It’s tough being the middle child. You tend to get lost in the mix between the oldest and youngest sibling. It seems like each one has distinct advantages to being on one end while the middle child gets lumped in the middle and seemingly forgotten sometimes.
The same can be said for managing the IT department for a mid-market company. On one end of the spectrum is the startup organization, a small band of employees who have their cell of computer resources in the cloud where they enjoy total elasticity and mobility. As a result, these organizations are highly nimble which allows them to react to changing conditions faster. On the other end is the large data driven enterprise with its economy of scale and extensive employee knowledge base. With the combination of its purchasing power and its highly trained staff, these organizations are the innovators and early adopters of enterprise technology that is constantly providing them an edge over the mid-market competitor.
Organizations are usually categorized as to how many employees they have. Both Gartner and Microsoft define a mid-market size organization as one having between 100 and 1,000 employees. The other recognized defining measurement is annual revenue, with Gartner defining mid-market as revenues somewhere between $50 million and $1 billion.1
SDN BRINGS GREATER EFFICIENCIES TO THE MID-MARKET
It is well documented that the largest benefactors of the Software Defined Networking movement have been the very large data driven data centers such as Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo, etc. They have the technical staff and budget to execute a transformation on that type of scale. But midmarket organizations can certainly benefit as well. The greatest benefit for software defining the data center within the mid-market company will be automation, which will be experienced several ways:
- Resources will be provisioned and decommissioned in automated fashion based on the real time conditions that are constantly monitored and dissected by the abstracted software orchestrator
- Users can self-provision their own resources through some type of self-service portal interface
- Migrations and fail-overs can be automatically generated in response to predicted failures which will prevent outages and increase network uptime
- Devices will not be managed by the CLI, but instead managed by policies that will automatically configure newly provisioned devices
In all of these examples, the IT staff will be released of the simple task of provisioning resources. With automation, organizations will finally be able to leverage their IT staffs to focus them on innovative value added projects. As a result of automation, the IT department will grow more productive, the infrastructure will be more elastic and employees will be happier since they will not be saddled with mind numbing provisioning configuration tasks.
Troubleshooting will also be less complex as technicians won’t have to focus as heavily on the physical plane. This is because hardware will be more generic as all of the intelligence will be abstracted. Log files from all infrastructure devices will be stored centrally where the software orchestrator resides. Since the entire network can be managed by the hypervisor and its single pane of glass, less time will have to be devoted to discovery. As time is money, a minute saved from troubleshooting is a dollar saved as well.
THE COST BENEFIT OF COMMODITIZED HARDWARE
As discussed in our white paper, Managing Your Data with Software Defined Storage, IT staffs will be able to free themselves of expensive proprietary software by utilizing commoditized software.
We have also published two articles which examined some popular software defined storage solutions: the virtual software appliance (VSA) and the virtual storage area network (VSAN). Each of these offerings are built around the same philosophy of taking x86 technology to host storage volumes. Like SDN, the intelligence is abstracted from the physical storage plane and hosted on a centralized virtual host where a single interface or hypervisor is already managing the software defined infrastructure. In our two articles we outlined two solutions currently offered by VMware and HP. In fact, the virtual appliance products of HP are simply software defined versions of their already existing SAN storage devices.
Another great example of software defined networking that utilizes x86 commoditized hardware is Microsoft’s SDS product called Storage Spaces Direct which is a part of Server 2016 which will be officially released later this year. The SDS solution was first released in Server 2012 and was heralded by ZDNet last year in an exclusive article which boasted, “get SAN features without paying SAN prices.”2
Storage Spaces Direct simply makes use of either the internal or direct attached disks of a cluster which could be the same cluster utilized to host your Hyper-V farm. The disks themselves are then clustered into a storage pool that can then be carved out as needed, allocating storage volumes when needed and assigned to a virtual server. This pooling of available storage is one of the principles that makes SDS so powerful compared to the fragmentation of different storage silos scattered across the data center. Like the comparable solutions offerings from VMware and HP, both HDD and SSD storage can be utilized. Data can be tiered to enable the most used blocks to run on SSD giving very high performance, while other data is stored on HDD giving great capacity. Storage or server admins can assign the desired resiliency required by their company’s storage redundancy policies that factor in multiple disk failure rates. Furthermore, SSD utilizes the same automatic failover cluster services that you already use in your Hyper-V cluster farms.
SUMMARY
Being the middle child isn’t necessarily a bad thing in an SDDC environment. Like the younger brother small business enterprise, you can enjoy the flexibility and elasticity enjoyed of a cloud environment. The difference is that the cloud will be exclusively managed by you in your data center, just like the largest data driven enterprises today, but at a much lower price point than was ever possible. In fact, many vendors are simply offering scaled-down or lighter versions of the products utilized by the big brother enterprise. That of course is another great benefit delivering products in software rather than hardware form. It makes it easy to customize in order to deliver less complex versions more suited for the medium size business. By software defining your data center, you can truly have the best of both words.
Sources:
1.Gartner IT Glossary http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/smbs-small-and-midsize-businesses/
2. Mary Brancombe, Why You Don’t Need a SAN Anymore, ZDNet January 1, 2015
