Software Defined Enterprises – A future imperative?

Software driven IT infrastructure will be key for various business initiatives, since software driven enterprise will be able to respond better to the dynamic demands of the customer and the employee. It also will enable better capital management, increase return of investment, meeting user expectations on a continuous basis.
‘Software defined’ will be a key word that one will hear often in the next few years. With social media, cloud and analytics technologies pushing the consumer to access and generate content more and more, the dynamic needs due to customer engagements will increase. Some of the key aspects of the software driven enterprise (SDE) are:

Software Driven Data Centres:

IDC predicts that worldwide SDN market will be about USD 8 billion by the year 2018. This is driven by 1.3 billion strong mobile workforce. But by that time, there will be a paradigm shift in terms of technology, architecture and implementation of SDN. For now the key driver is the lack of flexibility of the current networking infrastructure to user demands. The biggest lacuna is not about content creation or content storage, but content access. This directly point towards the demand towards a dynamic networking infrastructure. The fact is that the networking infrastructure is dramatically behind on both adapting to the demand as well as innovation. Software defined networking (SDN) is considered as the shot in the arm for a fresh approach the way network is managed. Key factors for this success would be to simplify and eliminate proprietary nature of management.
Content is given precedence over the underlying infrastructure. In short, SDN allows rapid deployment of new applications without the cost of restructuring underlying hardware configurations. Ananthanarayanan S, a leading Enterprise Management Consultant and an authority on SDE, says,” early adaptors are already moving towards SDN-like architecture.”

SDN helps in specific scenarios which are now in vogue in enterprises. They are BYOD and BYOA. The increased use of mobile technology by employees is a critical consideration for increased productivity for enterprises. There are already several enterprise applications that are on the employees’ devices, in addition to the popular applications like social networking, collaboration and schedulers. SDN gives controls at the application level to address quality of service as per criticality of the application for the enterprise as against applications that are of personal use. Even in a BYOD scenario, data can be managed securely because of software level controls.
One should understand that the user expectation of service is the same whether it is wired or wireless network. Aruba’s South India Regional Sales Director, Raja Vairamuthu quotes an instance of how ‘client match’ feature of Aruba Wireless Access Points enable seamless performance when clients shift within a wireless hotspot. This is possible by a sensitive software algorithm that manages the Wireless Access Points at the user-configuration level, and not at a device level.

Beyond the portable devices, the next technological disruption will be through wearable devices. Analysts say, by the end of 2018, wearable devices will reach around 130 million units. Adding these devices to the networks will be a complex activity by itself. So there is a huge volume of devices getting added to the existing networking infrastructure and there are more devices than people. With user’s service expectations remaining the same, the network management software should seamlessly include this.
Final aspect in this complexity of this demand is the need for speed. With content moving from text to picture, and now to video on demand, there is already pressure on existing networks to manage critical resources like bandwidth and quality of service. Now with user experience moving towards virtual and augmented reality, the high quality content that is to be delivered makes the present network management methodology look like a dinosaur. So, there is some quick and serious need for evolving more on technology and management of networks.
From an IT perspective, this means that every down time means serious business impact, and considering the cost of repair as well, this means that there is a huge multiplying factor in terms of costs. Anantha points that here is where SDN makes the difference. SDN reduces these configuration times, reducing network repair times and creates a dynamic environment where change management is crunched on time, but still accurately done. This in turn will enable businesses to save costs and become more agile, thereby increasing productivity.

Software Defined Storage:

Data growth is another dimension to the changing demands of consumers. Enterprises are now accumulating more business and user generated data. This is because there is a clear need to manage data, so enterprises can understand patterns that illustrates user behaviour, thus helping them to make informed decisions. “The challenge is to get the right information at the right time,” Anantha says, “It is about helping make right decisions to enable customer experience. “

In SDS, the underlying storage hardware remains the same. On top of this hardware, the software components enable automation of data administration, storage virtualization and storage provisioning, thereby providing the necessary return of investments (ROI).
SDS can allow organizations to provision storage on the fly, based on user demands, by using existing storage devices and software. An example of storage device is the NetApp filer system and IBM Global Parallel File System (GPFS). Such file systems can expand to millions of terabytes and handle multi-million files. A combination of management tools, virtualization and management controls, these software tools allow management of a complex array of servers to interact with different types of storage depending on user needs.
SDS also allows elimination of human error that is seen as the single most important cause of data outages.”More than network outages, storage outages impact organizations because multiple users are crippled at the same time, and more over the data integrity is always under question, although it depends on the nature of human error. This is more or less eliminated by SDS,” Anantha adds.
Most organizations feel the need for storage virtualization and SDS more urgently than ever, and we will see increased investments in these areas in the next few years. SDS will evolve to include improved integration and automated data management.

Software Driven Data Centres:

Data centres are not consolidation centres anymore. They are not physical infrastructure with stacks of servers and storage, connected to the world by networks to deliver application and data to the end users. In fact, they sound very brick and mortar considering the evolving demand of the enterprise user and the consumer. How much of leverage that we can bring out from this hardware is what software driven data centres is all about. According to a report, the SDDC will hit $77.18 billion by 2020, almost triple of the existing revenue. Combining combinations of SDN and SDS, and adding computing over it, SDDC can help squeeze more performance out of the existing hardware.

At data centre level, the cost perceptions are different. The cost overheads are higher in case of a data centre. The main advantage of SDDC is the opportunity that it provides, so enterprises may convert capital expenditure into operational expenditure.
While key aspects of SDDC are SDN and SDE, the evolution of Internet of Things will be the top driver of IT expansion in larger data centres. The agility and scale required in IOT deployments will ensure much of much of the data centre capacity resides with service providers. Given the number of devices connected and the large amount of data generated, it is not about individual hardware at storage, compute or networking level. Here a more comprehensive unit – at the data centre level will be the one that needs to be dynamic. That is what SDDC is poised to achieve.

At various levels, software driven IT infrastructure will be key for various business initiatives. Software driven enterprise will be able to respond better to the dynamic demands of the customer and the employee. It also will enable better capital management, increase return of investment and meet user expectations on a continuous basis.