Federal IT Survey Reveals Overreliance on Shared IP Storage Networks for Business-Critical Workloads

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today 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.  Other key findings 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. “Fibre 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.

Research Methodology

Market Connections conducted an online survey with 200 federal government IT decision-makers and influencers in October 2015. Fifty-seven different federal agencies participated in the survey.

Additional Resources

• Brocade Federal IP Storage Survey Results

• IP Storage Networks

• Video: The Network Matters for IP Storage

• The Necessity of Network Modernization

About Brocade

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) networking solutions help the world’s leading organizations transition smoothly to a world where applications and information reside anywhere. (www.brocade.com)

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