Think… virtual!

Virtualization is the new reality: servers, storage, networking… Anything and everything can be virtualized! Now, you can virtualize and automate a significant part of your operating environment, and turn IT infrastructure into a competitive advantage and differentiation factor, thus helping your quest for business innovation.

According to Deloitte’s survey, Tech Trends 2015, the data center of the future represents the dynamics that will allow mitigating costs, greatly improving speed and drastically simplifying the provisioning process, by deploying and maintaining the technological footprint.

So, it’s time for Software Defined Networking (SDN)! The recent technology developments now allow for the virtualization of the entire IT infrastructure (IT equipment, networking, storage solutions, and security levels). The potential benefits are resources savings, cost mitigation, and significant improvements on productivity. Nevertheless, the main differentiation that SDN has to offer is none other than creating the necessary infrastructure for adding flexibility to the way businesses market their IT services.

But, SDN is not the only aspect that is being re-designed. According to the above survey, next in line is Software-Defined Storage (SDS), that represents logical storage arrays that can be dynamically predefined, powered, managed, optimized and shared. Combined with IT equipment and network virtualization, you could remove and automate entire operating environments. As for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), it is slowly and gradually becoming a reality. Actually, in one of its recent surveys, Forrester estimates that static virtual servers, and private and hosted private clouds, are expected to be handling 58% of the total workloads by 2017 – an amount more than double of the workload that now exists in physical servers! Is there really any need to add anything further regarding what businesses should focus their efforts on?

Business owners, on their part, should not get “trapped” in the idea that SDN is just another technical detail, as they would really be off base. If you’re having trouble grasping the value and importance of SDN, try comparing the IT infrastructure to a supplies chain and a logistics network. It may be costly, quite complicated and sometimes dysfunctional, but only if improperly managed and used. Because in any other case, it is a true profit generator!

Having this in mind, businesses should seriously take into consideration the upgrading process of their data centers and the entire structure of their IT infrastructure. If for no other reason than to optimize the total cost of purchase, installation and operation of IT equipment.