Coping with the Modern Infrastructure Demand
Written By : Hammad Rehman (AVP - Infrastructure and Administration)
June 02, 2021
The meteoric pace with which technologies are evolving distress enterprises by increasing infrastructure costs and maintenance. Most of the recent market-bombarding technologies demand larger infrastructure provisioning, deployment and expenses thus requiring more resources and maintenance affecting abruptly the final ROI. Imagine the evolution from physical computers to virtualization, DevOpsSec, Dockers-containers, CRI-O, Kubernetes, microservices architecture and service mesh implementation. Many enterprises, at this moment, are hesitant to make a quick decision whether to invest to cope with technological change or to keep dragging enterprises with the current implementation that they have.
Hardware-defined infrastructure comprised of servers, network cables, routers, switches and such other aspects of a typical data centre drive what software solution is going provide. Expansion of infrastructure demands thinking on each of the individual components that construct a data centre.
Software-defined infrastructure conceptualizes and encompasses all of the components mentioned in the above paragraph. A centralized API console contributes to and administers operations and management of each component providing benefits to managing from one central platform.
Visualize a Hardware-defined data centre as a room containing infrastructure components when full, we are stuck. On the contrary, software-defined data centres would have dynamic footage and we can scale as per claims come forth. We would not be bound by the physical characteristics of resources available. This is the beauty of software-defined data centres, which in turn encourage embracing SDDC architecture and gaining eventual digital transformation capabilities through its implementation.
Software-defines data centre comprised of the following
- Network virtualization
- Server virtualization
- Storage virtualization
- Management
- Automation
Having core data centre components virtualized and enclosed in a container contributes to centralized management through one platform certainly providing ultimate agility, reliability, security, and scaling automatically accommodating outpouring workload scenarios and optimized performance. An appropriate implementation of SDDC would discover and accommodate spikes in workload preemptively and scale automatically. The control of the software-defined data centre is automated by software leveraging hardware configuration through intelligent software subsystems.
A perfect example of a software-defined network is Kubernetes SDN or OpenShiftSDN which administers automatic IP and port assignment to each pod/container/service that spins up and de-allocates those when destroyed.
Kubernetes is leveraging the software-defined networking that brought a plethora of advantages and is the epitome of modern networking. In the same way, SDDC would contribute to making data centre services easy and inexpensive to configure, and manage and reducing the need for manual human intervention utilizing ultimate automation.