Last week, I asked for perspectives on what software-defined is.
I am pleased to post this guest post by Chris Purcell, who is the manager in charge of Influencer Marketing for HP Converged Systems.
I worry when people start to talk anything about software defined as it starts to sound like where we were around 5 years ago with cloud that started consuming many headlines. These headlines quickly become the subject of cloud washing, which quickly created more confusion, leaving IT with more questions than answers.
If I took my marketing hat off, I would state that a software define datacenter is more an aspirational goal of many companies, than anything really tangible at the moment. I know HP is working very swiftly to come up with a industry solution that can be used in this space…which will no doubt appear and be grandstanded at a future Discover event, but that date still TBD.
In the meantime tools like HP OneView as a converged Management platform, starts to reveal the power of what a software defined datacenter of the future really could start to provide users (IT and consumers). Currently the datacenter is partitioned with many management tools…networking tools, storage tools, server tools…tools to monitor temperature, the list is endless. They are all specialized and need subject matter experts to use them, they are typically siloed to where it is difficult to see everything happening across the entire datacenter infrastructure. Also think about an end user trying to get services out of the datacenter…it’s hard and without any type of cloud interface it is typically slow and confusing.
Without a full industry definition around a software defined datacenter…think about it this way. A common management tool across IT that allows the management of all infrastructure across server, storage and networking…not a manager of managers, but one software application across everything. And from a consumer perspective a common software interface to use those services without a hand holder IT to act as that engagement manager. Okay, you could argue that consumers can already get these type of online services via the cloud, but there is still a many manual steps under the water that IT has to go through to provision these service correctly.
The slide above might help illustrate the changes that I think will be happening pretty quickly to enable a software define datacenter approach. But as I mentioned at the top of this email, a software definer datacenter is still an aspiration goal and not a tangible element within the datacenter at the moment.
Chris Purcell
Manager, Influential Marketing
HP Converged Systems
We thank Chris for taking the time to provide some edification on this.
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