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Ready for Software-defined Datacenters?

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Onkar Sharma
New Update
SDDC

The Indian IT infrastructure market (comprising servers, storage, and network equipment) reached $2.2 bn in 2012, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.5% over four years. Software-defined datacenters are a critical component for futuristic approach

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Guided by software, the networks and the datacenters are helping us envisage changes that the world could not imagine before. Software-defined datacenters (SDDC) have thus emerged as a critical aspect of the modern technology ecosystem. Indian enterprises cannot abstain from adopting SDDCs. Sooner or later they will embrace the change to make their datacenters smart and intelligent. It calls for a business opportunity for vendors and technology providers. Plus CIOs or service providers can not ignore the importance of building up software-defined datacenters.

If a report by Nasscom on datacenters is to be believed, India is emerging as the fastest growing datacenter services market in the Asia Pacific region. The report also underlines that the Indian IT infrastructure market (comprising servers, storage, and network equipment) reached $2.2 bn in 2012, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.5% over four years.

In simple words, SDDC refers to a datacenter where all infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service. Defining SDDC further, Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solutions, India and Saarc, EMC opines, “Control of the datacenter is fully automated by software, meaning hardware configuration is maintained through intelligent software systems. Software-defined datacenters are becoming important for businesses as they are considered by many to be the next step in the evolution of virtualization and cloud computing as it provides a solution to support both legacy enterprise applications and new cloud computing services.”

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SDDC is a step ahead and shows how businesses have become increasingly reliant on IT to deliver products and services and to interact with their stakeholders. This allows businesses to enhance productivity and efficiency. Plus the experts view SDDCs them as a step towards enhancing customer-experience.

“Consolidation, virtualization, automation, and self-service are milestones in the quest to eliminate complexity, down-time, bottlenecks, and rigidity. “Increasingly, the vision of a SDDC appears to be the next stop on this journey. In a SDDC, application environments are decoupled from computer hardware, data containers abstracted from storage hardware and network services separated from network interfaces,” says Santhosh D’Souza, Director, Systems Engineer, NetApp Marketing & Services.

What SDDC can do

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It is a question often asked by enterprises when they outline their IT budgets. And the question is a reality check which is important to see the opportunities and benefits, if et al. “SDDC is not recommended for all since it requires scale. Large enterprises and server providers are the ones which can pay heed to invest in SDDC. “Organizations can reduce IT costs in management, and improve quality of management and operations for deployments and changes. In addition, enterprises can also focus on the business with less effort and time spent dealing with IT,” opines Ramanan C, Director, Cloud Networking, India Subcontinent, Citrix Systems India.

“As customers are moving towards adopting a cloud model, SDDC will play a pivotal role. SDDC will hugely help in automation and improving IT agility for customers who are looking to adopt the cloud model. HCL sees adoption opportunities in various industry segments (product development) due to high degree of automation and cloud adoption, in these verticals,” says C Vijay Kumar, Corporate Vice President, Infrastructure Services Delivery, HCL Technologies.

Opportunities galore

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Indian organizations are shifting from a distributed IT set up to a more manageable and efficient centralized model. If D’Souza of NetApp is to be believed, Indian datacenters witnessed the introduction of visualization, orchestration, and workflow automation across their infrastructure and operations over the last five years. “Cloud computing architectures and utility models promise to further transform them over the next five years. The notion of a software-defined datacenter is beginning to take hold, with command and control abstractions being overlaid on top of pools of hardware resources,” says D’Souza of NetApp.

SDDC architecture is critical to effectively use hybrid cloud environments. Using a hybrid cloud, enterprise IT staff can broker services from private and public clouds, enabling control over the best location from which to run business applications. “The solution can also help profile applications and identify the most efficient, secure, and cost-effective IT operational model across both private and public clouds. The hybrid cloud also enables users to integrate their private clouds with multiple public clouds to create a unified hybrid cloud using compatible, on-demand services,” says Potnis.

Challenges in building up SDDC

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Building a successful software-defined datacenter requires planning and well-defined objectives to be achieved. “Are organizations expecting cost savings or agility or better security? Taking stock of the current situation and identifying areas that organizations expect SDDC to bring improvement in is important,” cautions Kumar of HCL.

There exist hundreds of challenges that need attention. Shedding light on the issue why global firms do not set up servers in India which are at the forefront of pioneering into any kind of technology, Potnis of EMC says, “In India, there are other general concerns around enforceability of contracts and law and order, which deter the Internet companies from setting up server units.” Plus Potnis considers the high cost of Internet bandwidth, which is the lifeline of the datacenter industry, as another impediment. “Also historically, servers and networking have been the stars of the datacenter. With the volume, velocity, value and longevity of data, however, we’re entering an era when data enterprise storage is taking over the spotlight as a key enabler for advancements in the datacenter,” says Potnis.

Some of the verticals that would be early adopters of SDDC, may include banking, retail, media and entertainment, and product development/engineering groups. In the banking sector, the next generation digital banking solution is expected to be front runner in embracing SDDC stack due to dynamic requirement around business. In retail, most of the e-commerce platform today require agility, automation, and continuous integration. These platforms will enable SDDC adoption in retail vertical.

Industries that anticipate and have huge change velocity are best served by SDDC. IT environments where setting up/tear down and changes to the datacenter landscape are norm, are expected to move fast on SDDC journey.

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