The challenge of the software defined data centre

The challenge of the software defined data centre

The software-defined trend is like a flywheel, generating momentum and energy as it goes, replacing existing ICT service models with the promise of engineering simplicity and a better economic return on invested capital by allowing organisations to pay for only what is consumed, keeping both CIOs and CFOs sleeping well for years to come.

Cisco predicts that over the next five years data centre traffic will nearly triple as organisations are forced by the explosion in new 3rd Platform services and applications, such as social technology, mobile computing, cloud, big data and the Internet of Things to evolve ever more flexible and agile IT deployments.

This nexus of forces is driving both data centre upgrades and the construction of large-scale, cloud-enabled facilities, but also the extensive consolidation and slow-down in construction of in-house data centres, representing the evolution of the traditional, hardware-defined corporate data centre into the fully virtualised mega-data centre.

While virtualisation and cloud-based delivery models fulfil the need for greater agility, they have the potential to increase management complexity and costs due to many organisations’ infrastructure and networks being at different levels of development. So for organisations to achieve true interoperability between cloud and traditional models they must integrate existing systems into a single management structure.

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