Enterprise 2011 Demand Technology Roadmaps To Succeed

By Skip Jones, Chairman, Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA)

The most exciting trends in Infrastructure Technology (IT) today require enabling infrastructure technologies that supply ever-increasing bandwidth and low latencies residing under consistent, time-proven discovery and management methodologies. Trends such as private and public cloud computing and storage, be it service providers local or global, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and storage- server- I/O virtualization all demand state of the art high bandwidth 0scalability with lighting fast turn-around times from when data is requested to when acknowledgement and data transfer begins. Also, given that managing cabling, power and cooling are increasingly top priorities of IT executives, these enabling I/O technologies must deliver lowering costs and power per gigabit per second on an ongoing basis. And whilst these hot IT trends thirst for the latest best of breed I/O capabilities, they have little to no tolerance for risk. Rather, they gravitate to tried and true incumbent technologies with reliable, proven track records in high-end data center applications. Conservative I/O evolution is largely favored to new and unproven technology.