Data center networking has largely revolved around two vendors: Cisco for Ethernet and Brocade for SAN and Fibre Channel. Our vendor satisfaction survey, based on feedback from 468 business technology pros, suggests this market may be getting much more dynamic.
Nearly half of respondents are willing to replace or add a vendor. While they still like Cisco and Brocade, Hewlett-Packard has worked itself into a tie in our ratings, and others are close behind. Ratings are based on user scores for factors such as reliability, performance, price, and support.
IT isn't thinking simple replacement cycle these days—65% have rearchitected their data centers or believe they'll rearchitect within 24 months. As data center architects consider converged infrastructures for storage and data networking and in-rack networking, it appears the playing field is more level.
This survey marks the launch of our IT Pro vendor rankings, for which the full data is available for subscription at informationweek.com/pro/dcnetworking.
 Download a free PDF of the Oct. 4, 2010 issue of (registration required) |
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