‘Big Data” and regulatory mandates are pushing expansion in ‘Datacenter Interconnects’

As datacenters continue to evolve, IT organizations are challenged by the emerging requirements of datacenter interconnect (DCI) and the exchanging, storing, processing and accessing of corporate information.

Datacenter interconnect — the requirement to interconnect two or more datacenter sites that are separated over a wide area — is being driven by regulatory mandates and the expansion of Big Data as a key component of internal and external business functions.

New research from International Data Corporation (IDC) indicates DCI service offerings are expanding rapidly, and more DCI service offering announcements will occur in 2014.

“DCI is one of the top-of-mind priorities for enterprise IT executives,” said Nav Chander, research manager for enterprise telecom. “With requirements ranging from disaster recovery, Big Data applications, regulatory compliance and flexibility to connect to third-party cloud services, DCI is a key enabler.”

According to survey findings presented in the research, 60% of respondents identified business continuity and disaster recovery as the function that DCI is currently used to enable. Dynamic workload scheduling and asynchronous data replication are emerging use cases, highlighting growing interest in more extensive use of virtualization and cloud technologies.

While DCI also continues to gain traction with Web 2.0 companies and cloud service providers, several examples of innovative DCI service offerings have emerged, with two early adopters, NTT Communications and Tata Communications (TC), finding success.

Additionally, IDC expects to see more CSPs launch new DCI strategies in 2014, which will form part of a larger virtual private cloud and managed IT infrastructure strategy.

Additional key findings:

• DCI remains a critical area of focus for enterprise IT, network and telecom managers;
• Enterprises are seeking DCI service providers that have IT applications and telecom expertise;
• Key business drivers for DCI vary by vertical market;
• IT expertise and network reliability/uptime were the most important service provider selection criteria across all vertical segments

This IDC Insight, Highlights of IDC’s 2013 Datacenter Interconnect Survey of Enterprise Datacenter Respondents (IDC #246745), examines emerging requirements for datacenter interconnect (DCI), which is an area of increasing focus within IT organizations. Analysis includes select results from a recent IDC survey of 200 U.S. enterprises that operate two or more datacenters.

For complete study results, contact IDC regarding Datacenter Interconnect: Survey of Current and Planned Enterprise Requirements.