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Software-defined data centres boost efficiency

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 02 Sept 2014

Businesses are at a crossroads where IT departments are faced with a choice between software-defined data centre or hardware-defined data centre for building and managing data centres.

According to Ian Jansen van Rensburg, senior manager: systems engineering, VMware Southern Africa, using hardware-centric infrastructure for computing, storage, network, security and management is a closed architecture that can be costly and time-consuming to implement.

However, moving these components into software (virtualising these components) will dramatically increase efficiency while lowering costs.

The virtualised components in the data centre can be available immediately while any workload can be provisioned from anywhere, says Jansen van Rensburg.

In a statement, VMware said the software-defined data centre empowers users to manage heterogeneous clouds, hypervisors and physical environments. Also, it supports open infrastructure frameworks and runs on any underlying hardware infrastructure.

In addition, the software-defined data centre transforms security architecture through a ubiquitous virtualisation layer.

Security settings and policies now reside within the entire virtual infrastructure rather than just protecting the edge of the data centre, says Jansen van Rensburg.

Also, with the software-defined data centre, companies can start building their own private clouds and get their ideas (in the form of applications) out to market much quicker, giving the business a competitive edge and it also allows them to make use of hybrid cloud environments.

Moreover, the IT department can actually become more innovative rather than just keeping up with the constant business demand.

According to Jansen van Rensburg, In SA, businesses have not fully adopted software-defined data centres but have taken the first steps towards compute virtualisation, which has been widely adopted and is still growing at a steady rate.

Companies are benefiting from the savings on capital expenditure and operational expenditure within these virtualised compute environments while enjoying the increased agility, he adds.

By reducing the physical server footprint in the data centre, companies have managed to save on power, cooling and floor-space ? resulting in massive reduction in capital expenditure.

If businesses need to reduce the capital expenditure further, they should apply the same concept throughout the data centre, concludes Jansen van Rensburg.

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