Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/709701
THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 13 www.datacenterjournal.com t his situation is causing business leaders to demand quicker and simpler ways to maximize IT investments and drive faster time to results. Soware-defined infra- structure (SDI) offers a solution for organiza- tions that are grappling with this challenge. It represents the fastest-growing segment of the infrastructure market, and a large number of businesses have tested or implemented it. SDI is taking hold in the enterprise and transform- ing the future of digital businesses, enabling organizations to more easily extract full value from data to accelerate performance-intensive analytics or machine learning. Soware-defined infrastructure delivers a set of capabilities that traditionally have only been available fully integrated with server, stor- age or networking hardware. It extracts that set of capabilities from the integrated system and makes it available to deploy on virtually any storage, server or networking system. Elements of soware-defined infrastruc- ture have been around for longer than we've called it by that name—just like Jeeps and Land Rovers were around before we called them SUVs. In fact, general recognition of the importance of this approach is only a few years old. But high-performance clustered file systems that have been in use for a decade or more can now be called soware-defined stor- age, and workload-optimization soware for traditional high-performance/supercomputing workloads is now soware-defined computing that also optimizes new-generation big data analytics. Cognitive businesses that use data to gain a competitive advantage across diverse markets such as financial services, media, life sciences and health care are investing in such soware that enable analytics and machine learning and make it easier to extract full value from data. Where is The need for sofTWare-defined infrasTrucTure? From an adoption standpoint, the indus- try is rapidly coming to see soware-defined infrastructure as a boon for companies entering a more futuristic data center. e market is accelerating very quickly. IDC estimates the market for soware-defined infrastructure will reach nearly $51 billion by 2019, growing at a rate of 23.8 percent from 2014 to 2019. is