Poll Stuck in Overdrive

We at Byte and Switch love to survey readers, and we're hardly going to complain when they respond enthusiastically -- as y'all have to our latest poll on data center backbone switches.

But a couple of things give me pause about the results from over 700 readers: First off, over 86 percent of those polled say establishing a data center fabric is "extremely important" to undertake this year.

That's surprising, given that many data center managers we've polled in the past are just getting around to technologies like virtualization and iSCSI. (Check out previous Data Center and Storage polls to see what we mean.)

And in a poll in early January, over 60 percent of respondents said they would not change their storage architecture dramatically in 2008.

Surely it's not a leap to consider that adding a single-vendor fabric, much of which is still in the development stage, would be a dramatic change in architecture.Granted, that poll involved substantially fewer respondents than the switch poll garnered -- less than 1 percent, to be exact. But we've been talking to storage customers for years, and the lack of consistency is puzzling.

One more thing: The backbone poll shows that 98 percent of all respondents so far will be turning to Brocade and Cisco for help with their 2008 data center fabric deployments. Curiously, Juniper has garnered not one vote!

The poll is still open. We'll leave it up for another couple of days, just to solidify the results. So if you haven't taken it and would like to do so, click here.

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