Increasing the value of the virtualized data center

Do you think SDI will alter the traditional IT approaches and increasingly CIOs/CTOs will look at it more closely to optimize their infrastructure?

The software-defined architecture enables us to deliver true infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service to our lines of business and our development organization with the requisite performance, availability, and security-all automated by software. With increased IT agility and efficiency, we're 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 fueled economy; SDDC will soon become the standard for successful businesses.

How does VMware approach SDI and your strategy?

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.

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.

Extending Compute Virtualization: Whilst many consider the compute virtualization market to be relatively mature, the story is far from complete. 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.

An IDC Server Economies Index 2013 report revealed that the economic impact of server virtualization is estimated to reach $3.89 bn in India by 2020. This comprises of costs avoided in a few key areas-server spending, power and cooling costs, floor space costs, and server admin costs. This is clearly an area that will continue to top Indian CIO's lists of IT priorities in the years ahead.

Network Virtualization: The discussion around Software-Defined Networking that started in 2012, and extended into 2013, will not abate in 2014. We expect to see more of a focus on network virtualization deployment next year as customers begin to see the benefits it offers. SDN delivers a layer of software that separates, or abstracts, network distributed applications from the underlying physical network. This delivers many of the same benefits that ESX delivers to applications within the compute domain-ie, improved efficiency, much greater agility and greater reliability, as operations become more automated.

Storage Virtualization: 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.

At VMworld 2013, we introduced VMware Virtual SAN, a breakthrough technology that extends VMware vSphere to pool compute and direct-attached storage. VMware Virtual SAN delivers a virtual data plane that clusters server disks and flash to create high-performance, resilient shared storage designed for virtual machines. It will unlock a new tier of converged infrastructure that enables rapid and granular scaling of compute and storage resources.

The trend toward abstracting storage is gathering pace across the industry, and we expect to see significant progress being made in this area in 2014.

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.

In terms of overall awareness levels on SDI-what is your experience interacting with Indian technology decision makers and how enthusiastic they are with SDI?

The Software-Defined Data Center is a unified data center platform that provides unprecedented automation, flexibility, and efficiency to transform the way organizations deliver IT. Compute, storage, networking, security, and availability services are pooled, aggregated, and delivered as software, and managed by intelligent, policy-driven software. Self-service, policy-based provisioning, automated infrastructure, and application and business management complete the picture. The result is a data center optimized for the cloud era, providing unmatched business agility, the highest SLAs for all applications, dramatically simpler operations, and lower costs.

The market in India has matured significantly in the past year. Customers have begun to see the benefits and advantages cloud infrastructure solutions offers them and are willing to invest and invest in technologies that can enable their business and operations further. India has been slow on the uptake, but we do see many of our early customers already planning for their Software-Defined Data Centers in India.

Businesses today depend upon IT to drive innovation and navigate the economic challenges facing them. Business leaders recognize and expect IT to deliver much more RoI in 2014; they will want the agility and flexibility to adapt to the dynamics of the marketplace while continuing to lower operating costs.

The right SDDC foundation can increase the value of your virtualized data center or private or hybrid cloud. In fact, it can help IT deliver on the promises you made to the business: agility, scalability, cost-effectiveness, on-demand resource utilization, and process optimization. By ensuring consistent quality and predictable provisioning times, SDDC will allow IT to support service level agreements for line of business colleagues. Finally, SDDC provides a building block to a service-oriented IT model.