48% of IT Decision Makers say that composable infrastructure is part of their data center modernization strategy.1
To stay competitive in business, it is important to strive to be first. First to innovate, first to market, and first to turn ideas into value. To get there, companies need to think toward the future, considering every possible competitive advantage. This is particularly true when it comes to today’s technology systems, where the entire industry seems to be moving at breakneck speeds.
The traditional data center has secured its place in the grand scheme of technology, serving as the backbone of application enablement and the epicenter of most corporate IT organizations. Even with the introduction of cloud-based technology, on-premises infrastructure is still viewed as the most secure and manageable data center technology. Where it lacks in speed and agility, it truly shines when it comes to governance and control. The problem is that most data centers still operate on rigid and expensive hardware, so innovation within the data center becomes extremely challenging and somewhat limited.
MODERNIZING THE DATA CENTER
So, how exactly should companies start to think about innovation at the data center level?
With complex environments, there’s no simple answer. On the one hand, companies must continue to maintain existing legacy applications fueled by traditional infrastructure, something especially true in secure environments or highly regulated industries such as banking, finance, and healthcare. On the other hand, businesses must continuously look toward new applications driven by consumer demand for mobile, social and cloud capabilities.2
In today’s age, it remains critical to support on-demand, high-performance applications, and knowing how to achieve that is the challenge. Building out newer data centers is not an option, nor is moving everything to the cloud. For the enterprise neither option is viable or cost effective. In addition, CFOs have become acutely aware of IT’s value to the overall organization. Over time, they have noticed substantial amounts of spending on technology operations and are asking more of their technology leadership:
“IT is being asked to lower operating costs in traditional environments while simultaneously increasing operational velocity in the development of new applications. A new architecture is needed, one designed to power innovation and value creation for this new breed of applications while running traditional workloads more efficiently.2 ”
For businesses to stay competitive, the data center must adapt to a faster, more agile model without losing control of mission-critical operations or allocating budget that yields minimal value.
LIMITATIONS OF THE CLOUD
For many businesses today, success is measured by the speed, flexibility, and cost effectiveness at which they can bring innovative applications and services to market. The challenge is that traditional data center hardware is proving too cumbersome, inflexible and expensive to support this endeavor. Provisioning is slow, re-wiring is prevalent and new hardware takes too long to deploy. Producing advanced applications at on-demand speed requires a more flexible, development-friendly infrastructure that can be set up and changed easily.
For many organizations, cloud adoption has provided an answer to infrastructure’s speed and flexibility limitations, but it doesn’t solve every challenge. The cloud can introduce security risks, foster shadow IT initiatives and introduce new management headaches. Additionally, when leveraging the cloud, companies often find themselves locked in to proprietary software schemes and operations systems. And with its usage-based pricing models, organizations that rely too heavily on the cloud have begun to experience sticker shock. Overall, the cloud is a logical way to get software applications into consumer hands as quickly as possible, but it can be inefficient, expensive and insecure in the long-term.
Instead, companies are ushering in a new age of data center technology. Known as composable infrastructure, this new generation of on-premises data center technology is helping today’s enterprises innovate faster than ever while maintaining control over their application environments.
INNOVATION THRIVES WITH COMPOSABLE INFRASTRUCTURE
Composable infrastructure combines the best of legacy hardware and cloud platforms, while being fully managed from within the local data center. With innovation enabling benefits, from greater simplicity to complete DevOps support, more and more companies are adopting composable infrastructure with an eye on beating out the competition and coming in first.
Here’s what companies are seeing:
- Simplicity through a single infrastructure model. Composable’s ability to be utilized across entire enterprises allows for open learning environments, the breakdown of silos and less staff training investment.
- Unprecedented flexibility. Composable infrastructure disaggregates and re-configures traditional infrastructure components when and where they are needed.
- Increases in value and decreases in cost. Efficiency gains deliver value while cutting the costs of over provisioning or leaving resources stranded.
- Less money, more results. Continuous IT service delivery aligns workloads precisely with business demands.
- Better control for administrators and developers. Powerful APIs allow discreet infrastructure control via familiar tools.
- Newfound agility and flexibility. Companies can scale at will and are no longer limited to any one operating model.
- Elimination of painful infrastructure set-up. Composable’s template-based approach cuts down provisioning times significantly.
- Improved maintenance. Through the use of install packages, versioning control and a programmable abstraction within update processes, composable makes it easy to stay up to date.
- Automatic integration. New components can be automatically recognized and added to resource pools, helping organizations scale faster than ever.
- Complete DevOps support. Provisioning at the speed of software means IT is no longer a bottleneck to today’s development efforts.
Each of these benefits opens the door to innovation for companies who are looking to stay ahead of the competition. Together, they present an opportunity for IT to realize the true potential of hybrid IT.
ENABLING INNOVATIVE HYBRID IT MODELS
Perhaps the strongest benefit of composable infrastructure is its ability to enable hybrid IT, which allows organizations to divide workloads between the data center and the cloud based on the unique needs of an application. This can inspire innovative models that keep sensitive data and workloads within the data center, while leveraging cloud applications for additional flexibility, scalability and speed.
92% of companies are implementing some form of hybrid IT.3
Innovative examples of where hybrid IT shines are emerging fast, which is why so many companies are on board with this new approach to managing IT in the modern day enterprise. It allows organizations to temporarily run workloads in the cloud when their needs outpace their data center resources. It gives application developers the option to create and test applications on-premises before moving the application to the cloud for general use. It unifies the management of all application resources for better visibility into performance and cost metrics. Notably, this flexibility provides power of choice—helping IT leaders choose where they run certain workloads based on their unique performance, security and governance needs.
Composable infrastructure solutions have been specially engineered to support the requirements of a hybrid IT environment. The innovative approach readily enables teams to maintain local control of both their hardware and their infrastructure, yet provides the ability to rapidly spin-up new services. It even allows developers to provision their own resources by taking advantage of the baked-in API—the foundation for Infrastructure as Code. Finally, as the technology progresses, the ability to swap disaggregate modules of compute, memory and storage—from different OEMs—will become a reality.2
TOMORROW’S DATA CENTER COMES INTO FOCUS
The future of the data center is coming together with the help of composable infrastructure solutions. With new composable hardware products entering the market regularly, IT will soon have many options when it comes to this innovative data center technology. To better serve the core business and lend a competitive edge, now is the time for IT leaders to begin their journey toward modernization. New implementations are being launched at forward-thinking companies across the country as IT leaders realize that composable infrastructure is the future of data centers—and perhaps a secret weapon to success. When you consider the mantra of “innovate or fail,” it just might be your best weapon too.
Sources:
1. IDG Research commissioned by WEI, June 2017.
2. HPE White Paper. The Top Ten Reasons to Move to Composable Infrastructure. https://info.wei.com/hubfs/Infographics/Infographic%20-%20Top%2010%20Reasons%20to%20Move%20to%20Composable%20Infrastructure.pdf
3. IDG Research commissioned by WEI, June 2017.
