Visibility – Moving effortlessly towards software defined environments

The surest path to IT success is to be able to quickly and accurately adapt to changing circumstances.

This is a truth that technical administrators and their counterparts appreciate all too well. Many large IT environments are in a constant state of change or reaction based on the demands placed on them at any given time. The best way to respond to what can often evolve into stressful and challenging situations is to establish a framework that enables agile response.

Virtualisation and the abstraction of resources, as a growing trend, can confuse this process. Although total and dynamic visibility of the systems that comprise this infrastructure is absolutely critical, traditional analytics tools are unable to take account of the ‘blind spots’ that this practice can create.

The popularity of cloud-based tools has also contributed to this mounting challenge. The absence of cloud consolidation within many enterprises has led to IT environments that integrate with numerous remotely hosted platforms. This, in collaboration with virtualised services is resulting in increased complexity.

The final, and perhaps most difficult issue to overcome is the agility with which new platforms can be provisioned. What once took days or weeks can now be executed in a matter of minutes. This capacity can, in many instances, result in an overabundance of undocumented storage frameworks.

As a result many administrators are finding themselves unable to effectively manage data environments. It’s hardly surprising, given the nimbleness of cloud and virtualisation technology and the presence of shadow IT within many enterprises, that the individuals tasked with the management of technical systems feel inundated and out of control.

In such a situation the most appropriate response is the application of a framework that is designed with these challenges in mind.

The Software-Defined Data Centre represents this ideal.

By intelligently consolidating abstract hardware and storage resources this framework is able to pool existing applications and portals into an aggregated capacity while automating them as needed to applications.

The process is uniquely simple at its heart. Software-Defined Data Centre applications consolidate all systems into a single platform built on an x86 architecture supporting industry standard protocols for stability and integration with the network backbone and APIs for application and management tool Integration.

Put simply, this is the next step on storage and hardware orientated visibility. Any administrator facing the challenges of cloud and virtualisation will appreciate the ineffectiveness of legacy tools in their management. It is now time to take a step forward towards a more consolidated view of frameworks that would otherwise be left totally disparate.

With this in mind, Business Connexion has worked closely with EMC to develop a Software-Defined Data Centre solution that can be applied to any environment or vertical.