SoftwareDefined

Organizations want the agility of public cloud and resiliency of private cloud - all at a lower cost of operations - and software-defined infrastructure can provide it.

with digital transformation infrastructure will really be THE business. Think of the amount of company who do not own anything else than their IT

IT has become core business for many organizations this drives a need for efficient, responsive infrastructure so IT becomes an business enabled and not a restriction. This is why software defined infrastructure is so important :-)

In addition, this infrastructure needs to be able to start at any scale and then grow as demand increases - without disruption to applications.

Automated configurations and templates that work with a DevOps business model

We've hosted a number of these industry chats recently about #bigdata and also #ECM. Everyone comes to the table from a different perspective. Data center infastructure is really at the core, though.

Infrastructure is fundamental to the performance of applications which in turn defines the success of your business.

Nice one @jswaroop ! That summarizes it well.

From a customer perspective we are seeing much tighter partnerships between the "traditional business units" and IT

Let’s talk about the pain points of running a traditional SAN Infrastructure. Why do we need to modernise?

Big IT Departments - centralised with huge capital needs is last century thinking

There are many... data migration / tech refresh, cost of operations, silos of SAN, complex management... I could go on and on!

Matching application and business demands to the underlying infrastructure is key

so what difficulties do you encounter when you're running your traditional SAN?

Build, scale, tear down and reuse

Traditional SANs are complex and need experts

They only scale via a fork lift truck

The webscalers (FB, Google, Amazon, etc) have built a better model - now that model is trickling down to service providers and large enterprises who have identified a need to modernize the data center.

Many reasons to modernize, one of the main ones I talk about with customers is about "de-risking" infrastructure, they know they will grow but have no idea to what extent.

Once the SAN gets old it needs to be replaced in total

SDS speaks to the gradual and evolutionary approach of IT Infrastructure

@stephenodonnell that's what we see a lot too! When we restructure parts of our datacenter or we redesign our customer's datacenter, we try to reuse parts to keep costs down

We have many customers who find that traditional SANs simply do not give the flexibility to scale out quickly enough and react to business demands

I also hear that in the case of enterprise storage infrastructure, the pain points are everywhere. Difficult to move applications when needed; Difficult to view which applications are using which resources..

so the discussion is to keep initial cost down against being able to scale quickly enough?

Traditional SAN is like having a pet that requires your attention most of the time and unfortunately needs to be put down every 3-4 years to bring in a new one

@50mu It's not really initial cost, is it? We see that the overall 5-year TCO is where the big operational costs savings are achieved.

Flexibility and speed of execution

Modern infrastructure requires fewest moving parts. Fewest points of failure. Fewest surprise cost elements. Facebook, Google and Twitter won't survive without following this principle.

so.. building a modern infrastructure using SDS on top of x86 servers future-proofs your infrastructure and allows the business to start at any scale, then change quickly as business needs change.

What are the benefits of #SDS? In 3 words. GO! :)

New applications require new infrastructure capabilities but legacy applications still work well on legacy

where do you start? Do you replace everything at once? So what when you're runing a really big datacenter? Do you replace old equipment for the new SDDC stuff?

Replacing parts but not all of the platform as it ages - so there is never a wholesale fork lift upgrade

@50mu Stop upgrading the SAN and add SDS instead

Future. Flexibility. Future

and this makes Moore's law valid fo everyone as you can leverage the going-down costs of servers and disks

in 3 words? Wow: Fast, scalable, cheaper?

Agility / flexibility, simpler management, lower overall TCO

haha, those can't be the 3 words I was looking for

@FelixNU98 Those were the words I was looking for!!!

peace of mind

Better. Faster. Cheaper #Marketing101

The benefits of SDS are Simplicity Scalability Flexibility

more cost effective? So when expanding, you don't need a bigger crowd of admins. Less people can do more.

Does your IT team also need an "upgrade"? New skills? How will they be acquired?

ready for the future: no need to hire more people, but the existing people need new skills

1infrastucture 2as 3code

@AllenFWard and many modern apps ultimately require access to traditional apps - like to a DB

New skills and more collaboration between existing siloed skill sets

Teams Need to redefine and Break Silos

@sddc_guy This is important but very hard - Everyone in the org need to be behind the transformation journey

Yes new skills are required - it really depends on deployment as well - will you be implementing hyper-converged or not? HCI causes the most changes in IT staff, and most vendors force you into this model.

But integrating SDS and Data Centre automation is the real winner

Collaboration and not isolation is the key, this is the hardest challenge. Almost requires a new breed of admins and support organisations. So offering a path to this brave new world and not a "rip and replace" approach is needed by enterprises

Having the same parts for compute, network and storage makes sense - totally generic data centre layout

and looking like AWS or Azure does in the public cloud