Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) released its latest research report entitled, Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center.
Based on research criteria defined by EMA Research Director, Systems Management, Torsten Volk, and EMA VP of Research, Network Management, Jim Frey, this major research study examines the expertise and opinions of early adopters and visionaries to determine obstacles and priorities on the way to managing the data center and external resources—IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and, ultimately, BPaaS—in a performance-, resilience-, security- and SLA-driven manner
At the core of the SDDC is the belief that in order to better serve the business, IT infrastructure—internal and external—must be controlled centrally and become radically aligned along application and service requirements. Deploying, operating, managing and updating applications in the most cost-effective, secure, agile and policy-compliant manner is the key goal of the SDDC. Business units are exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on the IT department to accelerate this process, requiring IT to obtain new skills, such as “programming,” and to focus on developing cross-domain expertise.
Today there are no central management technologies that are able to control and unify the entire data center and the public cloud. However, this EMA research illustrates that successfully implementing the SDDC starts with an IT operations mindset that focuses on reinventing the infrastructure provisioning and management process in a much more policy-driven manner.
“Study respondents acknowledged the fact that the SDDC cannot be implemented in the form of a technology project, but rather constitutes a concept that describes guidelines that follow the multi-year vision of entirely closing the traditional gap between enterprise IT and the business,” said Volk.
This in-depth research explores:
- The key components and business drivers of the SDDC
- The SDDC technologies and services IT professionals will invest in and which ones promise the highest ROI
- The key considerations when optimally placing new applications and the core risks
- The key challenges when creating new application environments
- How the Software Defined Storage (SDS) can enhance the data center
- The ‘net’ impact of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and network virtualization
- How the SDDC concept increase the ROI of private and public cloud
- The role of OpenStack within the SDDC and the key reasons for adopting OpenStack
- The role security plays within the SDDC
“Our study focused on organizations that are committed to the SDDC path and reveal a range of best practices experiences that span compute, storage, and networking across internal and external cloud environments, while highlighting the influence of standards, legacy infrastructure, and more,” said Frey.
Related Links:
EMA Report: Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center
EMA Webinar Feb 18: Journey to the Software Defined Data Center - EMA Research Results Revealed
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