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Demand Rises for: Software Defined Datacenters

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VoicenData Bureau
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Cisco

By Shrikant G

With new age applications calling for elastic IT infrastructure, there is an increasing demand for datacenters being defined by software traditional datacenter infrastructure is increasingly getting stressed as new age applications demand greater scalability and elasticity.

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A datacenter today is not just about servers, compute, cooling et al, it’s more about responding to the enterprise IT organization’s demands. So how does one innovate to the new normal IT requirements? Probably, the panacea lies in the Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC).

According to industry experts, as businesses become increasingly reliant on IT to deliver products andservices and to interact with their stakeholders, a simple, reliable, responsive, and agile IT architecture becomes essential to an enterprise. Such architecture allows enterprises to increase productivity and efficiency, differentiate competitively, and enhance customer experience. Consolidation, virtualization, automation, and self-service are the milestones in the quest to eliminate complexity, downtime, bottlenecks, and rigidity. Increasingly, the vision of a Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) appears to be the next stop on this journey.

SDDC Unplugged

In an SDDC, application environments are decoupled from computer hardware, data containers are abstracted from storage hardware, and network services are separated from network interfaces. This promises to transform the management and operations of datacenter components—compute, storage, and networking pools are assembled from out of different brands of products, and applications, data and network traffic is sent dynamically through sections of these pools based on a set of management policies and the quality of service demanded by the workload.

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Quality of service and data protection enhancements help IT to automate application provisioning based on service level and to realize operational benefits from pre-set policy-based security and delegation.

These features and capabilities enable IT teams to scale infrastructure to fit business needs, decrease the cost to run applications, and achieve higher levels of operational efficiency. Add to this, the mobile-cloud era brings with it an exponential increase in business expectations, andIT is at pains to respond. Its rigid, antiquated infrastructure devours budgets and resources at an alarming rate, but lacks the ability to deliver applications and services at speed and scale.

Reflecting on this, BS Nagarajan, Director-Systems Engineering, VMware India says, “This puts IT at a crossroads: It’s time to choose between continuing down the same outmoded hardware-centric path, or moving to a new way to do IT—an architecture engineered to serve billions of mobile consumers with millions of new applications and services. A highly automated, easily managed platform that embraces all applications, for deployment across datacenters, clouds, and mobile devices. This new architecture is the Software Defined Datacenter: Radically simpler IT that gives business unprecedented agility, speed, security, and control. Industry experts like Nagarajan also believe that the software-defined architecture enables IT to deliver true

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Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service to lines of business and development

organizations with the requisite performance, availability, and security—all automated by software. With increased IT agility and efficiency, IT is poised to meet the present and future demands of the business.

It is the logical model for creating and delivering IT resources quickly, efficiently, cost-effectively, and securely. And in a hypercompetitive, technology fuelled economy, SDDC will soon become the standard for successful businesses. Clearly a right SDDC foundation can increase the value of a virtualized datacenter or private or hybrid cloud.

In fact, it can help IT deliver on the promises it makes to the business: Agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, on-demand resource utilization, and process optimization. By ensuring consistent quality and predictable provisioning times, an SDDC will allow IT to support service level agreements for line of business colleagues.

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Finally, an SDDC provides a building block to a service-oriented IT model.

Market Dynamics

According to a report by MarketsandMarkets titled, ‘Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) and Related Market Outlook (2013-2018),’ the increasing demand for cost-effective and flexible datacenter solutions along with the requirements for resource pooling, break down of vendor lock-ins, and automatic networking configurations are playing an important role in shaping the future of the SDDC market.

Eventhough the solutions can be independently operated, they can be integrated together to provide an overall cost-effective solution for the datacenter. Major tier-1 companies and numerous start-ups are getting into this escalating market for SDDC.

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The report further pointed that the major forces driving this market are the innovations in processingpower and memory, high demand for resource pooling, and manual/custom networking configurations. There has also been a shift in the pricing models from hardware-based to software-based pricing along with the requirement for multi-tenancy support and vendor lock-in breakdowns. Companies providing virtualization and software defined solutions are looking forward to gain a competitive advantage in this growing market, thereby creating new solutions and intelligent and integrated management platforms for the overall and integrated SDDCs.

“The global SDDC market is estimated at $396.1 mn in 2013 and expected to grow to $5.41 bn in 2018. This represents an estimated CAGR of 68.7% from 2013 to 2018. In the current scenario, telecommunication service providers continue to be the largest users for SDDC solutions followed by cloud service providers. In terms of regions, North America is expected to be the biggest market, while Asia-Pacific (APAC) is expected to grow at a significantly faster pace in the coming years,” said the report.

Why SDDC makes Sense?

Agile programming of everything from applications to basic infrastructure is essential to enable organizations to deliver the flexibility required to make the digital business work. Reflecting on this, a Gartner report said, “Software-defined networking, storage, datacenters, and security are maturing.

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Cloud services are software-configurable through API calls, and applications, too, increasingly have rich APIs to access their function and content programmatically. To deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and scale systems—up or down rapidly—computing has to move away from static to dynamic models.

Rules, models, and code that can dynamically assemble and configure all of the elements needed from the network through the application are needed.”

Vendor Play

Players like NetApp, Cisco, and VMware have been working on technology innovation to simplify, virtualize, and automate IT architecture.

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For instance, NetApp works closely with its technology partners in the computer, networking, and application space to ensure that its technology innovations align with theirs, and together deliver on the promise of SDDC. NetApp is also a part of Standards Bodies and Open Source Communities, contributing code and formulating standards that are vital in creating an actionable roadmap for an SDDC across heterogeneous technology products.

According to Santhosh D’Souza, Director Systems Engineering, NetApp India, “NetApp’s Clustered Data ONTAP is the first storage and data management solution that makes the promise of Software Defined Storage attainable. In an SDDC, Clustered Data ONTAP focuses on agility in delivering IT services to application owners while improving operational and IT resources efficiency. NetApp’s Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) allows enterprises to deploy native multi-tenant, policy-based storage services via programmable APIs and application integrations.”

Outlook

Clearly, infrastructure is the key. Unlike software, the hardware infrastructure till now has remainedstatic and with scaling in and scaling out being one benchmark of good IT infrastructure. But oftentimes enterprises find it difficult to ride on rigid hardware infrastructure. And no wonder the capex on managing IT infrastructure only grows YoY and according to estimates almost 70% of the average enterprise spend goes into operations and maintenance. Add to that, the phenomenal growth of unstructured data only complicates the issue. This overstressed and underperforming traditional infrastructure has prompted many IT decision makers to ponder about the key question: How to simplify their IT infrastructure for greater agility, easier manageability, and greater visibility? How do we do this? The much-needed elasticity on to hardware devices can be done when the very infrastructure becomes programmable.

According to industry experts, a typical programmable infrastructure provides an API to the installed software stack (hypervisor, OS, application) for identification, monitoring, configuration, and control. The API allows the system to be integrated into higher-level, datacenter-wide management systems as a single, logical entity. Server, network, and I/Oresources are given a personality, provisioned, and configured on demand by applying a service profile to them. This technology supports the system’s unified, model-based management.

As Nagarajan sums up, “The transformation of the datacenter is inevitable. When it comes to solving customers’ most pressing problems with IT, flexibility and agility always win. We believe that the power of software, decoupled from hardware, is the way forward. Whether you are building out a new datacenter, or updating an existing datacenter, you are making an investment in your business. Virtualization is the enabling technology for a whole new wave of IT innovation.”

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