Today’s enterprise is looking towards IT to not only reduce their business risk and increase efficiency, but also to make sure that their revenue streams rise up and that is where Software Defined Data Center approach can play a vital role.
As per the views of Neeraj Matiyani, Director, Storage Solutions, Dell India, some of the major technology trends that are transforming the datacenter are datacenter consolidation and emergence of converged infrastructure.
“For most enterprises their business depends upon a well-functioning datacenter and they would prefer to reduce the complexity that comes with fragmented facilities in a datacenter. Data consolidation helps overcome these complexities and improves operations. Gartner predicts that 30% of datacenters will be converged within the next two to three years. More enterprises are turning towards to the flexibility of converged infrastructure models. Converged infrastructure has proved itself to be successful in achieving high levels of energy efficiency, superior manageability, and lower cap-ex as a result of increased density and a smaller footprint requirement for enterprises. The future of the datacenter lies in converged Infrastructure and hence we have several products in this space and today many organisations are adapting to this. The Power Edge VRTX, a converged infrastructure design made for the SMB segment and remote offices has been our most popular converged infrastructure solution till date,” he explains.
According to Ganesan Arumugam, Senior Director, Partners, VMWare, the right SDDC foundation can increase the value of a virtualized data center or private or hybrid cloud. “In fact, it can help IT deliver on the promises made to the business: agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, on-demand resource utilization, and process optimization. The software-defined data center or SDDC is about separating applications from their underlying infrastructure, by virtualizing compute, network and storage, and then automating their management in order to deliver the right applications, with the right SLAs, at the right price, flexibly, safely, securely and compliant,” he explained.
The SDDC framework has gained wide acceptance across global business giants and start-ups alike. In addition, customers that moved to a software-defined data center architecture have experienced greater value than those that did not and hence, moving forward, most of the enterprise IT is set to align itself along with the SDDC approach.
Whilst many consider the compute virtualization market to be relatively mature, the story is far from complete. As the technology has become more pervasive and mature, there is an enormous drive to use it to provide an efficient, flexible, unified infrastructure pool for all applications, including back office, mission critical, big data and high performance computing applications.
“Our sense is that in 2014 we will see a significant uptick in the use of virtual infrastructure to host big data and grid applications – as enterprises seek to maximize the work they can do, and make application deployment more flexible and more reliable. We should also expect a continued focus on Big Data and HPC as the IT enablers of differentiation in business. The separation of applications from their storage is ongoing. As these and other storage efforts come together, vendors like VMware will deliver the layer of software that allows data to be easily available within available infrastructure, and to make it easily consumable by applications, irrespective of the underlying physical storage infrastructure,” Ganesan from VMWare adds on.
Automatically Managing the SDDC
In spite of the amazing progress being made in separating applications from the underlying compute, network and storage infrastructure, this is only half of the SDDC story. The broad trend seems to be towards managing heterogeneous SDDCs (and thus Clouds) so that consumers of XaaS are able to manage a broad portfolio of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS providers, together with their private Clouds and partner service provider assets.
Growth in Indian Market
In the next generation era, IT organizations must respond nimbly to the business while controlling costs. Progressive IT organizations are becoming more like service providers, striving to enable self-service models of IT consumption while maintaining control and compliance. Virtualization has accelerated delivery of IT services and is a required foundation for cloud infrastructure. Delivering self-service and managing these dynamic environments requires a new level of automation to minimize cost and ensure control and compliance and this is what helping the adoption towards next generation data center infrastructure.
“The Indian market is still vastly untapped for us and this still remains an opportunity. We are putting our energies behind increasing the awareness and for our solutions and the benefits they deliver for the business. While we continue to see growth across all segments and sectors, the SMB segment will continue to be a key area of focus as well as emerging sectors such as the government &defense segments. Enterprises will continue to further extend the benefits of virtualization across their data centers,” Ganesan from VMWare adds on.
Neeraj Matiyani, Director, Storage Solutions, Dell India, says that Datacenters are being reshaped by new application architectures and service delivery models. This enables new bandwidth traffic flows within the datacenter and demands high performance from servers. And hence more and more Enterprises are turning to the cloud to improve business agility, reduce expenses, and accelerate business innovation,” he adds on.
