TheInfoPro

Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Networking

It has been a long time since network firewalls, those technological barriers designed to prevent unwanted communications between networks, could be considered a technology on the move. Sitting comfortably with 99% of respondents having the technolgy in use (per TheInfoPro’s Wave 13 Information Security Study), spending changes are usually budgeted around either network expansion or a technology refresh. Or, as one respondent put it: “It is purely procedure. When we have to buy new boxes, we are forced to look at alternatives.” …

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Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Networking

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIP reports when they are fist released? Sign up here for TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

In the most recent wave of TheInfoPro’s networking research, the category “aging hardware/keeping up with technology” jumped to the forefront of respondents’ reported pain points. In the previous wave of networking research, a majority of network managers reported that they believed there was a five-year lifecycle for the networking products they invest in, and the majority did not see that lifespan increasing. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of respondents reporting no change in networking budget increased from 17% to 43%, and the number who are seeing an increased budget dropped from 58% to 32%. This lack of new budget dollars since 2007 is starting to come to a head in enterprise environments, as network managers are running short on time maintaining “maintenance mode.”

Network 8 Wave - Top Pain Points for Network Managers

Other complementary concerns reinforce this theme, such as a renewed focus on capacity planning, a sharp increase in concern around managing network growth, and a decreasing but continuing concern among those stating that meeting customer expectations for performance was a key pain point.

The need to do more with less may translate into at least part of the reason that WAN optimization solutions rank third (up from fifth) in TIP’s Infrastructure Technology Heat Index®. As network managers are forced to resolve latency issues with ever more sophisticated application traffic, the need to do more with existing lines becomes a necessity. The same is likely true for network performance monitoring (up from fifth place in 2009 to No. 1 in both waves for 2010) and network fault monitoring, which went from being unranked to the third hottest technology in the network security and software category.

Gauging the user sentiment, part of the problem is the need to replace some equipment on a point-by-point basis, without having the ability to conduct a more comprehensive networkwide refresh, and the inconsistencies that result from this approach:

• “Architecture related to the fact that we have aging hardware.” – Networking pro at a large-enterprise energy/utilities company
• “Keeping up with technology – we just had a Cisco refresh last year, and it’s opened up new avenues for which we would need to buy new hardware. Also, people now expect the highway to be wide open. If the construction doesn’t relieve the traffic problem, then people aren’t happy.” – Networking pro at a large-enterprise energy/utilities company

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Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Networking

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

Dell, a leading x86 server provider that in April purchased storage systems provider Compellent, added to its enterprise stack with the July 20th announcement that they will acquire high speed Ethernet switch maker Force10. This reported $700 million acquisition represents a final strategic piece: the networking capability required to offer a converged stack of server, storage, and networking components.

As solutions such as vBlock (the combined VMware, Cisco, EMC offering) and HP Matrix look to offer the definitive integrated infrastructure solution to enable enterprise private clouds, Dell appears to have taken a further step in the same direction. In our companion Server study, Dell shows up third for Intel blade servers, behind the leader HP and is catching up to number two IBM with a few percentage points of “in pilot” implementation.

Force10’s penetration of the rankings for enterprises’ 10 Gigbit Ethernet backbones, as seen below in the technology roadmap, demonstrate a product that has made it’s way into enterprise deployments. The category itself remains dominated by Cisco.

Force10's Share of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Backbone Market

The previously private company Force10, released it’s initial 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch in 2002, has some 1,300 customers, 750 employees, and a reported $200 million in annual revenue. One of our respondents summarized Force10′s value position as follows:

• “Good pricing, reasonable performance.”

As we conducting are currently conducting Networking Wave 9 interviews, we should see a few reactions in the narratives from our respondent base of end user IT managers, similar to the reactions seen in the Storage Wave 15 study when Dell acquired Compellent:

• “Compellent is interesting but was too small, but now it is Dell, [so we] may have another look.”
• “We like the integration of integration of tiering of the Dell and Compellent products.”

Converged infrastructure continues to be a hot topic across multiple of our sectors, so in the coming months expect to see in depth metrics around your peers’ adoption across the Server, Network, and Storage studies.

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14 January 2010 - We have been hearing in recent interviews that aging hardware is a concern for networking managers. In August 2009, aging hardware was certainly near the top of the list of concerns for networking professionals; many organizations tried to get more useful life out of their hardware during the economic conditions in 2009. While we have questioned this in the past, we decided to take the pulse of the enterprise community once again and find out whether expectations for increasing the useful life of networking hardware were increasing or not. Reliability of hardware has been the downfall of a number of providers over the years, but it appears that a useful life of five years is the consensus number at this point. All that said, the rising level of concern about aging hardware may be ushering in a new refresh cycle, in time to take advantage of new data center network architecture concepts.
 
Key data points supporting our position:

• The single largest respondent group rated networking hardware useful life as being five years (42%), while 20% indicated a useful life of six years or more.
• Nearly 20% of respondents thus far indicated that they wait until a networking hardware unit fails before considering its useful life to have expired.
• While 49% of respondents cited that the useful life of hardware is remaining constant, about an equal number of organizations cited an increasing useful life and decreasing useful life.

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06 January 2010 – Despite hopes to the contrary, networking spending is likely to remain stagnant in 2010 with no significant increase in spending expected, according to early results from our most recent networking study. While many were hoping for a return of the positive growth rates of 2007 and 2008, the combination of a slowly recovering economy and the absence of significant business and technology drivers (such as necessary upgrades and new product introductions) are all conspiring to keep networking spending on a trajectory only slightly better than 2009. Spending will be mostly limited to those technologies that are viewed as delivering quantifiable cost savings, such WAN optimization and the conversion of voice systems to IP, at the expense of big-ticket investments driven by significant business expansion. Below are data points supporting this position:

• Earlier this year, those citing higher spending for 2010 stood at 37%. Now, only 26% of organizations are citing higher spending for 2010, a decline of nearly 30%. The number of organizations citing neutral spending has increased to 46% as compared to 41% in Q3 2009. This is a change of more than10%.
• However, the percentage of organizations citing lower spending only declined from 22% in Q3 2009 to 24% in the current study.
• Many organizations are telling us of their ability to further squeeze cost savings from their data transport budgets and from high-return projects such as WAN optimization and voice systems conversion to IP.

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