The Next Wave of Workload Portability
The next generation of Enterprise IT is expected to be fully software defined to achieve the scale and efficiency demands created by third platform technologies. Compute, storage and networking vendors will have to migrate to technologies like cloud, Software Defined Storage (SDS) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) to ensure that their products stay relevant in the Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) ecosystem. This paper examines the benefits of SDI, the gaps in emerging standards, as well as the new possibilities SDI offers for workload portability and the business opportunities for the new SDI ecosystem.
The Emerging Need
The migration from traditional, heavy iron to general-purpose x86 servers in the nineties resulted in large, complex heterogeneous data centers that were difficult and very expensive to manage. In the past decade, the emergence of cloud and virtualization, combined with dramatic cost reductions for data center hardware, have driven an evolution to large homogeneous, data centers which are comparatively easy and cost effective to manage.
Server virtualization technology has matured over the years and has achieved widespread adoption. While it has dramatically reduced the provisioning time for servers, network and storage provisioning is still time consuming. Moving forward, next generation enterprise IT architectures will need to be completely software defined in order to deliver the scale, stability, speed and efficiency required to support rapidly evolving enterprises. Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) mainly drives this change. Currently, SDI is achieved through virtualization and orchestration; but network and storage virtualization and software-based orchestration still need to be standardized.
SDI Impact for OEMs
While SDI implementations will differ widely, there is one element that they all will have in common; and that is the hardware will be standardized. The compute server industry has already reached this level of standardization and the storage industry is moving in the same direction.
New Opportunities Created by SDI
The heart of any SDI architecture is the software in the control layer that provides the orchestration, security, diagnostics and other tools required to make things work seamlessly. Here, there is a significant opportunity for new technologies and software to add value and gain market share.
Future of Workload Portability
The capability for an application to automatically and programmatically provision the infrastructure that it requires will open up a new dimension to workload portability. SDI building blocks will make it possible to migrate an application instance across data centers seamlessly.
Future applications will generate metadata specifying the infrastructure they need. The platform layer will decipher the metadata and use it to provision the required underlying infrastructure. North bound platform layer APIs will be standardized making it easy to migrate application components across data centers. The standardization will also enable administrators to migrate entire business applications across the data centers and clouds.
The final goal is to achieve the state of standardization where applications can be dragged and dropped across data centers – from private cloud to public cloud, or across public clouds. SDI and SDI applications’ ability to abstract and represent resource requirements will facilitate this powerful drag and drop functionality
Conclusion
We are still in the early stages of a full-fledged SDI model. SDN and SDS are two key SDI building blocks that are yet to be standardized. SDS has to reach the point where storage is application aware and an application’s storage requirement drives the provisioning and monitoring of the storage in a self-serviced manner. This is done under the Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and performance objectives specified by the application. In addition, the interfaces between the data services layer and data storage layer need to be defined, and implemented by the OEMs. The ability to drag and drop an entire business workload across different datacenters (public or private cloud) without any administrator’s interaction is the goal. This can only be accomplished with a comprehensive set of standards and a tightly coupled eco-system.
We have a long, yet very exciting road ahead. What part will you play in creating a fully featured SDI computing environment?
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