PRO+ Premium Content/Modern Infrastructure

Even with increasing levels of virtualization, many data centers remain antiquated, with lots of physical infrastructure struggling to keep pace. But technology trends such as cloud computing and virtualization have put pressure on IT departments to modernize the data center topography to create more flexible services with better performance and security.

The software-defined data center may be central to that shift. The concept behind this approach is to bring every aspect of IT environments at parity with virtualized and cloud-based resources, including storage and networks. As a result, all infrastructure is delivered as a service and automated by software.

This special supplement on the software-defined data center defines this new trend in computing and explores the specific implications for storage and networking resources. It looks at some of the benefits of the new software-defined data center, in terms of improving infrastructure management, reducing dependence on hardware, automating tasks and enabling data centers to scale. But it also looks at some of the serious challenges of this nascent technology, particularly immature vendor offerings that don’t deliver on the functionality promised yet.