About 45% of business in North America intend to increase spending on software-defined wide area networking over the next 2 years, a survey by IHS said.
IHS said it conducted the in-depth surveys with 150 businesses in North America about their data centers.
Cliff Grossner, research director for data center, cloud and SDN IHS, said “Within the data center, raw speed with support for software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualized workloads are the top requirements for fabrics among companies participating in our enterprise data center study.”
“Meanwhile, outside the data center, SDN-led transformation is taking hold in the WAN optimization market. There’s a shift from optimizing application traffic flows over a single point-to-point WAN link to automated and dynamic load balancing of application traffic over multiple link types—MPLS, broadband, Internet, cellular.”
Security, application performance and scalability are respondent organizations’ top data center investment drivers, the IHS survey also said.
The need for raw bandwidth continues to drive higher speeds in data center networking: Among enterprises surveyed, 100GE deployments are growing at the expense of 40GE, and 25GE is nearly invisible
The use of solid states storage is increasing and placing higher performance demands on storage networking
By 2017, 71 % of respondents plan to have software-defined storage products in live production, up from 15 % today, the survey also said.