Business-critical workloads threatened by shared IP storage: Brocade-Federal IT Survey

NEW DELHI: NASDAQ-listed networking solutions company Brocade has announced the results of a Federal IT Survey revealing the top three pain points when business-critical workloads are accessed through a shared rather than a dedicated IP Storage Network. Survey respondents cited maintaining a secure environment (48 percent), data loss (34 percent) and poor application response time (30 percent) as primary concerns.

Commissioned by Brocade and conducted by Market Connections, the IP storage survey polled 200 IT decision-makers across 57 federal agencies. Key findings listed in the release include:

• Forty-five percent of an agency's total storage capacity is IP-storage based with 78 percent of respondents expecting this capacity to grow by at least 10 percent in the next year. Increasing server virtualization, unstructured data and converged system deployments are the biggest drivers for storage growth.
• Increased security (57 percent), reduced costs (35 percent) and improved application performance (35 percent) are the top three benefits of a dedicated IP storage network.
• Forty-four percent of mission-critical workloads and more than a third of business-critical workloads use a shared IP storage network.

“Using shared storage networks for mission- and business-critical workloads compromises agency effectiveness,” said Anthony Robbins, vice president of federal, Brocade. “Fiber Channel is the most trusted and widely deployed storage network infrastructure for mission-critical workloads. But for business-critical workloads, dedicated IP storage networks are essential to ensuring security, mitigating data loss and delivering better application performance.”

Third Platform technologies such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and mobility put additional pressure on shared storage networks threatening the agencies' ability to quickly access business-critical information. With dedicated IP storage networks, agencies can reduce the risk of mission failure and provide greater performance, reliability and security by ensuring there is a direct path for high-priority agency workloads.