Research conducted in late Q121 shows conventional thinking around mass migration to the public cloud is overstated, with private clouds continuing to fuel global expansion of more agile and automated data center sites
Pluribus Networks, the leader in SDN automation and disaggregated networking, and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™), a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, announced the release of a new research report, titled “The State of Data Center Networking Annual Report, 2021.”Commissioned by Pluribus and to gather data around the top drivers behind organizations’ hybrid and multi-data center investment strategies on a yearly basis, the report confirms a number of industry trends regarding application architectures while challenging several assumptions around the rapid shift to the public cloud.
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Among the key findings of the research, which surveyed global enterprises in March/April of 2021:
- The Public Cloud is Not Retiring Data Centers: while the overall share of applications living in the public cloud will grow modestly over the next two years, approximately 75 percent of applications continue to live in the private cloud, including on-premise data centers, colocation data centers and hosted private cloud. The key motivations for keeping applications within data centers were: security (48 percent), performance (40 percent), control over compliance (37 percent) and cost (29 percent.)
- More Data Center Sites, Less Consolidation: not only is the private cloud holding onto a large share of applications, when measuring enterprises with at least two data centers, the majority already have 3-5 data centers locations and 34 percent of large enterprises have 11 or more data centers. Plus, more than half (56 percent) of the enterprises surveyed were planning to add new data center sites in the next 24 months, as compared to 12.5 percent that planned to consolidate sites.
- Private Clouds are Moving to High Availability Architectures: when asked to describe their multi-data center strategies, enterprises signaled that broad deployment of active-active and active-hot standby architectures would nearly double over the next two years from 44 percent to 81 percent. Not surprisingly, network complexity is the biggest obstacle to the adoption of these architectures.
- Network Virtualization and Automation Will Go Mainstream: to address the challenges around multi-site architecture, deployment of network automation components will grow from 37 percent to 69 percent over the next two years, while deployment of virtual network overlays is expected to grow from 38 percent to 81 percent.
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Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research for EMA, and Jay Gill, senior director of marketing for Pluribus Networks, will host a free webinar to discuss the report and its conclusions on Tuesday, May 25 at 8 a.m. PST. Registration for “The Future of the Data Center Network in a Multi-Cloud World” is currently open.
“Digital enterprises are embracing hybrid multi-cloud architectures with private clouds as the anchor,” said McGillicuddy. “This latest research confirms that a majority of applications and workloads will continue to run in private cloud data centers for the foreseeable future, whether on-premises or in a colocation or hosted environment. As enterprises continue to invest in private cloud infrastructure, they are rapidly modernizing their networks to support high application availability and agility, including significantly increased deployment of network virtualization and automation.”
“The data from this research quantifies what Pluribus has observed when speaking with enterprise customers over the last year, namely that data centers are still a key strategic asset and the demand for agile, high-performance and high-availability private clouds will continue to drive expansion to more locations and investment in multi-site fabrics,” said Gill. “If private cloud is to continue to improve application availability and performance, enterprises will need to abandon legacy approaches and virtualize and automate their networks using overlay networking and stretch those virtualized networks across geographically separated data centers.
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