By Prakash Mallya – Director, Data Centre Group, Asia, Intel Corporation
As the cloud matures, organizations are looking at newer possibilities ofagility, cost efficiencies, and availability of services across markets. This is precisely whatthe hybrid cloud model provides – an ideal combination of the public and private cloud that offers businesses the opportunity to balance capital and operational expenses, by making optimal use of in-house resources, while improving responsiveness to changing business requirements.
The cloud services market in the country is forecast to grow at over a CAGR of 10% during 2016-2021 . We believe that a part of this growth will be contributed by the hybrid cloud, as it allows companies higher flexibility and scalability of the public cloud, and the benefit of higher security and responsiveness of owning, of the private cloud. In fact, the hybrid cloud is becoming increasingly popular in India, as the government and enterprises seek new ways to optimize the plethora of citizen data for e-governance related services, and the rising SME sector looks for smarter way to manage their business processes.
Making this digital transformation a reality, is Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI), an approach that indicates a shift from the traditional hardware-defined model to a software and workload defined model, which helps bolster the management and orchestration of the private cloud.
To understand the potential of SDI, let’s consider a typical private cloud data centre of today. It’s likely that we’ll find compute, storage, and network resources, sitting in their own silo, merrily doing their own thing. This is a typical hardware-defined model, where many appliances have a fixed function that can’t be changed. Despite virtualisation making the management of compute servers more efficient and providing flexibility, the upkeep of this data centre, overall, is generally manual and slow. Like building a house, it requires time, cost, and heavy lifting, and results in a fairly static structure. If you want to add an extension at a later date, you’ll need to haul more bricks. It is all these complexities and added costs that are driving the vision for an architectural transformation of the data centre to SDI, where the private cloud is as flexible, scalable, and automated, and therefore as efficient as the public cloud experience.
The Data Centre of the future
Today’s data centres are at an inflection point, where compute servers are already making inroads to SDI. Now we need to apply the same principle to storage and network as well. When all of the resource pools are virtualised, we can manage them in the same automated and dynamic way that we do servers, creating resources that fit our business needs, rather than letting the infrastructure define how we work. It’s as if you could move the walls around within your house, add new windows or remove a bathroom, whenever you liked, with great dexterity and without any additional costs, time or labour.
Additionally, 5G is on course to be another game-changer for consumers and enterprises. Expected to be commercially ready for deployment by 2020, 5G will supercharge the IoT by increasing performance and improving network intelligence and flexibility. Continued advances in virtual reality and collaboration tools will mean communicating in the virtual world will be as natural and intuitive as it is in today’s traditional office environment. In this sense, technology will facilitate the creation of the “human cloud” which will need to be elastic, scalable, and automated while offering robust efficiency for a smooth operating experience.
So how does SDI make this trend an efficient reality?
• Reduces capital expenditure: SDI can help reduce capital expenditure two ways. First, it can work with industry-defined open standards and protocols to limit dependency on proprietary hardware and software. Second, cloud and virtualization technologies can increase utilization of current IT assets instead of over provisioning for worst-case demand situation.
• Automates manual resource provisioning: SDI offers operational efficiencies for compute, network, and storage resources. Automating resource management and provisioning will reduce the number of specialities needed, simplify monitoring and manageability, and expand self service capabilities to improve quality of service and meet SLAs.
• Increases flexibility and agility: SDI enables us to allocate infrastructure resources according business needs, application requirements, and infrastructure mapping, optimizing both IT value and user experience.
• Limits the need for specialised knowledge: SDI increases the speed of integrating the infrastructure domain, thereby reducing the spending and the dependency on proprietary hardware and software specialists and other supports.
The importance of hybrid cloud cannot be underestimated. From allowing businesses to scale up quickly, to providing on-demand services and facilitating flexible working practices, the cloud should be at the heart of any workplace transformation plans. With new infrastructure design such as SDI set to increase the power of the future cloud, early adopters are going to find themselves with a huge head start over the competition as they will not only be more agile and productive, but also in a better position to rapidly address the ever-changing market needs.
