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14 | THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL www.datacenterjournal.com rate makes it the fastest-growing segment of the infrastructure market. And Gartner agrees—the soware-defined data center is crucial to the long-term evolution of an agile digital business. Industry experts have examined the cause of rapid growth and have concluded that a broad set of organizations across industries are adopting soware-defined infrastructure because of the promise of flexibility and lower data center costs. Financial services, oil and gas, health care, and life science are some of the best examples of industries moving toward a more agile data center. Different or- ganizations focus on different areas of soware-defined infrastructure, however, depending on their most pressing needs. For example, soware-defined computing may be a priority for a financial-services firm looking to cost-efficiently acceler- ate analyses and give their clients greater value. Although soware-defined storage may be at the top of the list for a health- care organization struggling to regain control over rising storage costs as it deals with explosive data growth. Organizations have been implement- ing virtualization soware to optimize IT efficiency for traditional workloads. In a new generation of scale-out cloud apps and analytics workloads that need hundreds of thousands of compute nodes, however, organizations require soware- defined infrastructures that will virtualize these workloads to optimize performance and cost efficiency. ouT of The sTarTing gaTe To gain an edge over the competi- tion and extract valuable insight from data, organizations must follow a certain methodology: 1. First, come to understand why the business needs it. Improve knowledge and awareness of the capabilities and how they can be applied to improve performance, de- liver faster time to results and reduce costs. 2. Second, IT departments must ensure that the skills necessary to implement these environments are available internally or through IT partners. e required skills will depend on, or perhaps influence, selection among the flexible deployment options for a soware-defined infrastruc- ture: as soware on custom physical infra- structure, as a system with soware and hardware pre-integrated, or as a service delivered through a cloud provider. 3. Last but certainly not least, organiza- tions must manage the cultural shi that must take place to ensure that the move toward soware defined delivers the desired results. For those organizations first dipping their toes into the soware-defined waters, the initial step is to see a proof of concept (POC) and get a feel for the target envi- ronment from a design and performance standpoint. Today's neW-generaTion apps are The nexT- generaTion apps Business demands are changing thanks to the explosive growth of data. Gone are the days of simply managing small silos of data aligned to one specific application. We've entered the age of "new-generation apps and analytics," and a multiscale hybrid-cloud infrastructure is critical for new-generation data centers that need to support them. e future is here, and these apps and analytics are be- ing deployed now. Multiscale hybrid-cloud infrastruc- ture is important for two reasons: 1. Scale-out architecture apps and analyt- ics run across multiple compute nodes, which require a different type of IT infrastructure than traditional applica- tions such as core banking, ERP and CRM apps, or business-intelligence reporting. ese new-generation apps are different and require a different IT infrastructure that can optimize them across multinode environments—on premises, in the cloud or across a hybrid cloud. 2. e amount of data in the enterprise coming from analytics, IoT apps and growing video applications (surveillance, video processing and video analytics) drive a much larger data footprint, and therefore larger storage requirements. is situation requires the organization to deploy multi-tiered infrastructure that can dynamically move the data from high- performance storage to a balanced cost/ performance storage tier and ultimately to lowest-cost, long-term storage. It's critical that this capability can also run across a hybrid cloud environment. conclusion e initial major cloud-computing players were able to make the cloud viable because they implemented proprietary soware-defined infrastructure. e cloud service providers that can deliver the performance, reliability and scale of IT to support these workloads in a cost-efficient way are only able to do so because they implemented soware-defined infrastruc- ture using commodity servers, storage and networking physical infrastructure below their soware layer. It's that demonstration of soware- defined infrastructure's power to deliver this type of economics that caused the greater commercial focus and growth in this market. e companies implementing soware-defined infrastructure for their own IT are doing so because they want and need to deliver an economical IT in- frastructure, as well as support traditional and new-generation workloads in an era of explosive data growth. Organizations should gain awareness and understand- ing of the soware-defined-infrastructure marketplace as well as determine the best- fit solution, required skills and cultural shis that will allow them to ameliorate their pain points—then and move toward a data center of the future. n about the author: Bernie Spang is Vice President, Software Defined Infrastructure, IBM Systems. He has held various engineering, business-development, strategy and marketing roles at IBM over 30 years. He also earned a Master of Computer Engineering degree from Syracuse University during that time. Before joining IBM, he earned his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology.