What is the value of migrating to a Software-Defined Data Centre?
The Software-Defined Data Centre is pivotal for organisations in delivering an IT infrastructure that can support the agile enterprise while retaining the level of control needed to ensure resilience, compliance and security.
In December, HighPoint hosted a webinar specifically focused on this topic that explored the value, challenges and best practice in migrating to a software-defined approach. This first blog in our series will expand on the outcomes you should be looking for when embarking on your journey to a software-defined data centre.
What Is A Software-Defined Data Centre?
The Software-Defined Data Centre extends the virtualisation concepts such as abstraction, pooling and automation across all of the resources and services in the data centre. It allows organisations to make the paradigm shift from thinking in terms of how the infrastructure works to focusing on what they want the infrastructure to achieve – the ‘intent-based’ approach.
This allows for data centre operations to be defined in terms of a common set of policies which can then be used to drive automation, deliver pervasive security, accelerate multi-cloud adoption and achieve application assurance.
What are my SD-Data Centre options?
Each of the leading data centre technology vendors have their own specific solutions in this area and not surprising each have different pros and cons. The solution we have the most experience in, and as such will use as our example in this blog series, is Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Cisco ACI is a comprehensive Software-Defined Network Solution that is delivered on an agile, open and highly secure infrastructure and focuses on the needs of the application to provide policy-based network services.
What are the fundamental benefits of SD-Data Centre?
In a digital world, organisations need to be more agile and require an IT infrastructure that can adapt at pace to changing business needs. Fundamental to this is leveraging hybrid-cloud environments that combine the control and security of their own data centre infrastructure with the scale and elasticity of public cloud offerings.
The Software-Defined Data Centre enables organisations to create an agile business-centric architecture that combines the scale, simplicity and elasticity of cloud providers with a highly secure, automated, software-defined fabric on-premise infrastructure.