Other Key Findings

Cat 6A, New Trend: Globally, more than half (54%) of the organizations installing new copper cabling would invest in Category 6A 10Gb/s solutions. Rajesh Kumar - Country Manager, The Siemon Company, also reflects this trend. He says, “Due to budget constraints, IT managers are faced with a dilemma on whether to go for a solution that will need replacement after a few years or to future-proof their investments with something as advanced as Cat 6A or 10G 6A. In this light, the growing acceptance for 10G 6A is heartening. Owing to all this, the awareness level of Indian buyers toward technologies like 10G 6A is particularly high.” In this segment, airports (86%) and healthcare (71%) have become the major drivers for Cat 6A 10G copper solutions.

Fiber, Another Choice: Of those respondents installing new fiber cabling in their data center, the shift to 10G and 40/100G laser optimized multimode fibers is accelerating with data centers installing OM3 at a rate of 31% and installing OM4 at a rate of 19%. Dileep Kumar, Director – Product Management, ADC KRONE, says, “Fibre is seeing increasing acceptance in data center cabling as it is ideal for high bandwidth applications.”

Green Emphasized: As green initiative has swept all the verticals, data centers space also continue to receive investment for power and space saving technologies. They include blade servers that are more compact and energy efficient than previous types, and virtualization that allows more applications to run on each server. These result in cost savings due to a reduction in power and space requirements.

Need for Easy Cable Management: As additional computing resources are packed into equipment racks, data centers are moving to higher bandwidth solutions to reduce growth in cabling volume. Blade servers can decrease cable management complexity as compared to rack optimized servers. Thirty percent are already using new 10Gb/s copper connectivity solutions in the network backbone and a further 46% plan to do so in the next three years.

10Gb/s Over Copper: In horizontal network segments, 21% are using 10Gb/s over copper. Another 48 percent plan to upgrade in the next three years. The new, high performance copper cabling, conforming to the Category 6A/Class EA standards, offers an easy-to-install option for high performance data centers.

“The recession is not damping the demand for on-line information and applications that is driving data center expansion,” said Brooks. “At the same time, growth of image and video databases is increasing the requirement for higher bandwidth infrastructure within the data center. As servers get smaller and support more applications, connection densities and bandwidth will have to grow dramatically.”

Two things that were widely recognized by the respondents were: importance of performance and quality in data center infrastructure, with more respondents named performance (62%) and ease of maintenance (54%) as influences on their purchasing decisions than said they were influenced by prices of products/solutions (50%). It underscores that the customers are realizing that nowadays performance and quality are taking front seat over the price unlike the past.