Be prepared for fabric

The research firm estimates around 30 percent of large IT-organisations globally are in the planning stage of deploying fabric-based architectures, but so far, only 10 percent have implemented them.

The lure of FBC to users include potential efficiency gains, because of the modular and more cost-effective investment in the building blocks, “a more-holistic and flexible ability to manage the underlying resource pools and the ability to reconfigure the systems to match changing workload or other requirements”, writes Gartner analyst George J. Weiss. Together with fabric-based infrastructure (FBI), which integrates hardware and software infrastructure with automation on top, organisations could achieve faster provisioning and increased IT agility at much lower costs, thanks to automated allocation and reallocation of pooled resources. This could potentially help IT-organisations optimise their datacentres, says Gartner.

While ‘fabric-based’ is being driven more from the vendor side, with vendors seeking to take a larger share of IT-budgets in a time of relatively flat spend, CIOs should be preparing for this space, says Phil Sargeant, research vice president at Gartner. But the infrastructure model has both advantages and disadvantages.

“One of the plusses is that the vendor does a lot of the work for a client, so if an organisation wants to deploy very quickly and don’t have the skills in place, it fulfils that function.”

FBI solutions bring together networking, storage and computing resources and have often been optimised for a particular task, so organisations don’t have to buy all the parts and then put them together, he says.

“Many years ago we talked about turn-key systems — this is an iteration of a turn-key system,” says Sargeant.

Cost savings in infrastructure consolidation and labour are other benefits.

On the negative side, these solutions come at a certain price. “[Clients] often pay a premium,” he says.