The third platform is starting to mature within the software-defined enterprise and is being built on the back of virtualisation infrastructure many businesses have today.
So said Greg McDonald, sales engineering senior manager at Dell, presenting at the Dell Solutions Tour 2015 event in Midrand yesterday.
Market research firm IDC describes the third platform as IT that is built on mobile devices, cloud services, social networks and big data analytics. The third platform of IT technology evolution provides architecture designed to meet cloud scale, speed, agility, mobility, and growth demands at hyper scale, IDC adds.
McDonald notes current IT infrastructures are simply not designed to scale, with most organisations still dependent on siloed approaches to how they choose or run their technologies.
He points out the siloed platforms bring numerous challenges to the business, citing lots of protocols from vendors to follow and lack of compatibility across the infrastructure which make it difficult for IT to manage.
According to McDonald, software-defined storage (SDS) provides a solution to bridge the gap and enables enterprises and vendors to extend existing storage investments to leverage new applications and data - providing a clear path forward to the third platform.
IT departments and CIOs need to start discussing how to shift the business focus from traditional infrastructure which is purchased from multiple vendors into a service delivering model, says McDonald.
"The siloed approach needs to change if we want to fix, improve and optimise our infrastructure. The way to do it is introduce a multi-vendor cross-platform unified management architecture where the enterprise applications and the workloads that are available run on open standards-based hardware. Virtualisation underpins all this architecture."
Organisations are slowly being introduced to software-defined networking architecture platforms which will revolutionise the network and storage space which is the last space not completely controlled by vendors, says McDonald.
With these platforms, organisations will no longer be bound by physical storage limitations. They will be able to transform their existing infrastructure into a simple and open platform to deliver fully automated storage and data services to users and applications, McDonald concludes.
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