UK IT industry opinion divided on knowledge of software defined data centre

The results of the survey, which took place at Cloud Computing World Forum on 24th and 25th June 2014, show that although three out five respondents (61%) claim to be familiar with the concept of the SDDC, when it comes to explaining the benefits most are unclear. 13 per cent felt it was about performance, 20 per cent felt it provided centralised management and 17 per cent admitted they don’t understand the benefits.

The statistics go on to show that two in five (43%) don’t think a true SDDC is achievable in the next 12 months as a production ready environment, whilst a quarter believe it’s already achievable.

The results also revealed a myriad of answers when respondents were asked to explain in more detail what SDDC might mean to their business. From flexibility and security through to efficiency and lower costs, it’s clear a true explanation of the benefits has not yet been defined or understood by UK organisations.

So what is the SDDC? Put simply, it’s a way of making the most economic use of data centre resources like storage, network and compute: controlling infrastructure consumption, process and operation down to component level without having to touch a single piece of hardware.

In the SDDC, business rules manage the automated deployment and redeployment of workflows and workloads across tiered platforms to deliver continuously optimised application performance. This means that an SDDC can (for example) rapidly respond to demand changes and bottlenecks without human intervention, ‘promote’ or demote workloads into different performance tiers based on their business criticality at a point in time (such as month end billing, new customer-facing initiatives, archive data) and even move these on and off premise, in and out of the cloud.

Kevin Linsell, Head of Service Development, Adapt, said: “The data centre industry is rapidly evolving. Building large scale data centres with high-volumes of hardware is very inefficient and complex for cloud service providers and enterprises. Through the use of software as opposed to hardware, a SDDC can offer businesses a fast, incredibly flexible way to not only virtualise their IT, but increase levels of flexibility, agility and control from the application layer down, removing barriers and enabling business transformation.

“As with all big evolutionary steps it can take a while to arrive at market acceptance. Our latest survey is evidence of the confusion in the industry - education is key to ensuring businesses reap the rewards that SDDC promises. Working with some of the key software-defined players in the industry, we recently launched an almost ‘living’ fluid platform that will solve a lot of our customers’ challenges, making sure their environments are continuously optimal, completely aligned with and driven by their evolving application requirements.”