VIDEO: Exploring the Benefits of the Software Defined Date Center

Josh C.:

Software-defined data centers at their basic level allow you to automate tasks which will save your time and money with your IT staff. They can set a process or a workflow and allow other users to enable that without having to go in and manually adjust and configure things which saves time, resources, energy and allows people to turn around IT projects a lot quicker.

Software-defined data centers can actually inject intelligence into your day-to-day activities, things that your regular IT staff might not catch onto, things that they won't be in the office to catch onto. So by building intelligence around what you're accomplishing through self-service portals, through triggered events, you can catch things that your normal IT staff won't.

The benefit is do it once, reap the benefits., many times. When you truly understand what you're automating from a business level and have that functionality work for you through and through, it becomes a button press moving forward, whereas current legacy systems will prior you to provision hardware, software multiple times again and again. And although you may have the process down, you are investing time, human resources, money into that process every single time.

Solutions that enable data-center automation would be solutions that have built-in programmability. Cisco's UCS manager has hooks for other programs to come in and provision hardware for you without having to touch their interfaces at all. Cisco networking switches have tie-ins as well that you can pre-provision those or provision those based on a service or workflow, really any equipment that has specific tie-ins so you're not locked into a particular vendor to get this type of functionality.

You just have to look out for its interoperability with certain coding features like JSON, XML, things like that, that will enable you to really tie into those so it's not, in most cases, vendor specific. You can really cross platform and still achieve that interoperability and software-defined automation.

I think everyone understands the benefit from a business level, not even necessarily an IT level. There is hardware assurance in a way that they will purchase hardware that will function in a software-defined network allowing these hooks into an automated or abstracted cloud or software-defined network or anything really. But they aren't necessarily utilizing the technology off of the bat. It's really a comfort and a growth thing in the IT industry, I think.

Once the IT industry, as a whole, has a few really good examples of cost-savings automation through and through, so not a basic-level automation of maybe a virtual machine or a server, but injecting a whole business process into that automation and seeing how hands-off that approach can be and how quick the turnaround time is, it will probably skyrocket once people start to really understand the total benefit of that.