Gartner, a leading technology research company, this week released its research "Should Your Enterprise Deploy a Software-Defined Data Center?" , highlighting key areas of consideration for businesses looking to adopt the software-defined data center (SDDC). The discussion precedes two major events - Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit 2015 in London, U.K. and Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada that will be taking place late October and early December this year.
Gartner discussed on how the emergence of modern IT approaches such as DevOps is fueling the shift towards virtualized IT environments on the back of increasing demand by businesses for more agile, flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. As a result, data centers which are powering an organization's digital capabilities are becoming less and less infrastructure-centric and more software-defined.
The growth of SDDCs is a timely development within the IT space, to cater not only for IT organizations, but also as a response to the force of digitalization that is sweeping across every business. The Internet, broadband and more recently, the Internet-of-Things have catalyzed both digitalization of businesses and the virtualization of many business processes - from procurement, to managing production and operations, to marketing, sales and to managing their workforce, inventory and customers. These trends in turn see the increasing adoption of public and private cloud services which most businesses are turning to as part of their goal of maintaining leaner set-ups.
SDDCs emerged as a response to these business needs, but Gartner said that businesses need to exercise caution and be more selective when moving to this new infrastructure, primarily due to the level of expertise in Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) engineering and architecture that is required for successful adoption of SDDCs.
Dave Russell, VP and distinguished analyst, Gartner
I&O leaders can't just buy a ready-made SDDC from a vendor. First, they need to understand why they need it for the business. Second, they need to deploy, orchestrate and integrate numerous parts, probably from different vendors. Moreover, aside from a lot of deployment work – new skills and a cultural shift in the IT organization are needed to ensure this approach delivers results for the business.
Gartner shared some best practices IT organizations can adopt to ensure a successful shift to more agile data centers, and this includes granular adoption of SDDC, with trials on smaller areas within the business and gradual expansion to other areas. Storage, said Gartner, is one area that most businesses can start off with. At the same time, businesses must be aware of software vendor lock-in, as each SDDC infrastructure involves the integration of various software, and businesses must hence be ready to be committed to their early choices.
Gartner added that by 2020, programmatic capabilities of an SDDC will be considered a requirement for 75 percent of Global 2000 enterprises that seek to implement a DevOps approach and a hybrid cloud model.
