Digital Transformation Driving Modern Infrastructure

Anuroop Gupta, Country Manager - SAN Business, Brocade India

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Digital Transformation Trends

Digital transformation today is the reality of the indus­try and is driving all the modern infrastructure trends. Now, every customer demands more automation, real-time analytics to assist with understanding and man­aging their infrastructure better and accordingly fine tune the performance. The four trends shaping this driving digital transformation is virtualization, expo­nential data growth, customer’s SLA requirement from the service provider and flash. Storage infrastructure is being pushed to its limits because of these upcoming trends. With the rapid digital transformation, one has to have a robust infrastructure that can support this evolution. Brocade plays a vital role in the provision of networking solutions proclaiming themselves to be a market leader in the storage networking space being the only company offering the 32 Gbps switch in the mar­ket as of now.

Exploring the Upcoming Technologies

Virtualization continues to drive the market. Initially it was just servers and virtual machines, but now it has moved from compute to software defined storage to software defined data centers. Virtualization is key in every organization. The first thing that clients inquire about is how good the switch for his virtualization en­vironment is. Hyper convergence is another technology which is getting established in India.

Simultaneously, researches conducted indicate an es­calation of data in the next few years by more than 50 percent thereby increasing the demand for storage sys­tems. Upcoming technologies like IoT, social platforms utilized as a form of communication, big data, media and mobility are the top most factors that drive this data growth. With this increase in the inflow of data, organizations are getting more informed and demand­ing. With the rise in demand, they will need better SLA and have particular expectations from the SLA require­ment along with how much downtime they are willing to have in a year. An infrastructure that can handle the sheer volume of information and the transformation is of primary importance.

The fourth trend, flash technology, has dramati­cally changed the market and is transforming the stor­age landscape. Initially, the adoption was a little slow as customers believed it to be a bit more costly than the traditional storage. But post experiencing the benefits of deploying flash in terms of handling larger work­loads or improving the performance, we have witnessed a large scale adoption. It provides performance, data reduction, longevity, reliability, power and space. Mul­tiple data centers will be switching to flash for active data in the next five years with the TCO strongly favouring flash.

The Next Disruptive Technology

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) is predicted to be the next disruptive tech­nology in the industry that organizations have begun talking about. Fibre Channel (FC) should be adopted for NVMe as FC is the only purpose built fabric for storage; it has the lowest latency, has the scalability, reliability and availability. NVMe over FC is engineered to enable NVMe-based message commands to transfer status informa­tion and data between a host computer and a  target storage subsystem over a Fibre Channel network fabric. If one would add speed, availability, scalability, performance that is achieved from the FC network, it should always be a preferred technology for NVMe.

Deriving More Value from Applications and Infrastructure

Brocade is one of the first companies to deduce exactly which direction the market is headed and where the digital transformation is going to take the market. To support all these aforementioned futuristic technologies like NVMe or flash, the requirement of a robust net­work is of top priority. Catering to this requirement, the company launched Gen 6 approximately a year ago. The Brocade Gen 610, storage switch, was recently launched leveraging the power of Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology that provides 32 Gbps performance and has built-in NVMe capabilities.

It is an entry-level switch designed for a broad range of environments right from small shared storage fabrics to network edge deployments in data centers. It proffers proven reliability, high performance and affordable access to industry-leading Gen 6 Fibre Channel storage networking technology. Suited for any business, the switch largely targets the SMB sector. Organizations can start with eight ports and scale up to 24 ports per switch or can migrate to a higher switch as well. Addi­tionally, the Brocade G610 switch is easy to use and install, with a point-and-click user interface that simplifies deployment to save time.

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