Organisations recognise the value of cloud computing, and also that it is a gradual migration to get to. Brocade’s Country Manager Sean Ong said, “And governments in the region have stepped up education and adoption of cloud computing products and services.”
According to him, fabric-based networking is also gaining traction.
“The benefits of having a flat, reliable, high performance network with simplified management and increased agility have been validated, and fabrics have changed the manner in which vendors and organisations design the data centre.”
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| Sean Ng |
Ong also shared that the industry will continue to see increased adoption of Ethernet fabrics in 2013, along with deployments in tandem with SDN and other new technologies.
Period of future-proofing
And because 3G connectivity is being replaced by 4G in many places, it is a matter of time before Ethernet networks move from 10G to 100G. With the expected pressures on networks over the next few years, organisations are beginning to future proof themselves by adopting more powerful switches and Ethernet interfaces.
And with data centres growing at a tremendous pace, this is putting strain on IT operators.
Ong said, “In 2013 we will see a rise in usage of storage or integrated stacks, bundled storage products that includes servers, networking components and server virtualisation software.”
The past year had seen an explosion of interest in OpenFlow, which enables software-defined networking (SDN), which Ng described as a revolutionary technology to the way networks are managed.
He also shared, “We expect to see companies across the government, FSI and manufacturing vertical markets, push out feelers towards adopting SDN, which will result in early SDN service deployments.
“We also see rising interest in virtualisation services adoption by organisations with early adopters going ahead in their efforts to realise hardware cost savings.”
Ong sees more government innovation in services delivery driving demand for networking solutions, although there was some slowdown in activity in the FSI and manufacturing sectors last year. Cloud infrastructure readiness is becoming a priority for the delivery of applications in a more optimised manner.
“In Malaysia, the government will continue to take the lead, especially for technology adoption to reduce operating expenditures (OPEX) and for virtual desktop infrastructure, with applications sitting in secure cloud servers – reducing software licensing costs and allowing better control of security, particularly as the BYOD trend strengthens,” Ong observed.
Going forward, the uptake of cloud computing will continue to gather pace. Organisations will require more sophisticated solutions that are scalable, cost-effective and agile in the network as they transform their data centres.
Brocade’s business
“In Malaysia, our business more than doubled in 2012 compared with the year before, and our IP business grew-ten-fold. Product demand was driven not just by technology refresh cycles for IPv6 readiness and organisation-specific reasons – particularly in the public sector and in education, but by a rising appetite to realise cost savings and achieve a better ROI with built-in scalability in a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ model.”
Brocade introduced new innovations in the campus LAN (The Effortless Network), in their Ethernet fabrics technology portfolio, with new Brocade ADX series of Application Delivery Switches, and a new 24-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) module for their MLXe Series routers.
“With these innovations, we have tackled some of the most challenging problems that the networking industry has been dealing with for more than two decades to bring about new levels of scalability, resilience, automation and flexibility in the network.
“Our products are also entirely future-proofed to be adaptable with new technologies, especially software defined networking), and are interoperable to fit into any data centre infrastructure,” said Ong.
