There is little debate that the arrival of cloud computing has fundamentally changed the way enterprise-level IT systems are designed and provisioned. Underpinning the business benefits that the cloud has brought to the enterprise is the data centre, the lynchpin holding things together.
To the casual observer it does not look like the data centre itself has kept pace with the rate of change in the services it used to offer, but according to industry observers, that could be about to change. The era of the software-defined data centre is rapidly approaching.
Software-defined networking, storage and more are pointing towards an unprecedented capability to shape and refine services to more closely match the needs of the business.
Processing power
"In the past, we’ve seen a very physical approach to the kinds of services being offered by data centre owners – you can get server or storage space," said Declan Hogan, head of enterprise servers, storage and networking with HP Ireland. "But what we’re likely to see more and more of is companies offering processing on a per-terabyte basis. It’s not about offering access to hardware, it’s about offering access to a service. This service-orientated approach is about meeting the customer’s needs, as opposed to offering just more hardware or equipment-orientated services."
The reason for this evolution in the data centre space, in Hogan’s opinion, is that enterprise level customers have developed trust in the delivery mechanism and are happy to hand more responsibility to the data centre. In effect, they are saying to data centre owners ‘we trust you to take care of the infrastructure, we just want the capability.’
"This is being driven partly by customer demand and partly by the level of innovation taking place out there. IT is being seen more and more as a utility rather than an art form. Customers know exactly what they want and really they aren’t that interested in how you meet their needs, as long as you meet them," he said.
According to Hogan, we’re rapidly entering a post-virtualised world in which companies are now used to virtualised servers and machines, and no longer feel tied to physical machines in the way they once were.
Virtual comfort
"A few years ago you’d have had to carefully explain to customers what virtualisation was, but everyone gets that today. They understand virtual machines, virtual cores, virtual memory and what they all do. They understand to a good level the requirements for disaster recovery and particularly the benefits that virtualisation has given them in their own environments," he said.
"Because of that, it’s becoming easier for service providers working out of data centres to offer virtualised services. In general we’re seeing an increasing demand from customers for a service-orientated culture from IT, and in turn it’s becoming easier to give them that. There’s demand on both sides."
The next 18 months are likely to see a lot of change in this area, with Hogan expecting to see an acceleration in demand for the service-driven, rather than infrastructure-driven, approach.
"At the moment, when people talk about virtualisation they typically mean server-focused technologies, but I think storage virtualisation is going to become mainstream and people will no longer think in terms of disks. Instead, they’ll think in terms of tiers of storage, in terms of provisioning so many terabytes of tier one, tier two or tier three storage, as opposed to disks," he said.
"I think networking will go the same way. It’s already becoming a commodity, and with the advent of software-defined networking we’re seeing much more flexibility in terms of networking provision and in the ability to offer services on top of networking, such as virtual networks. Server virtualisation is there, and storage and networking are where we’re going to see huge increases in virtualisation and in the capability to wrap that as a service."
Demand driven
Indeed it seems increasingly likely that the future of both cloud computing and high performance computing (HPC) is going to be more and more software-defined according to Ray Walshe of the DCU School of Computing, who is also director of the Cloud Computing Technology Research Centre.
"Cloud computing has been designed for and is most effective where you have horizontally scalable-type technology. For example, if you suddenly need to provision thousands of servers because you have a huge spike in demand, then cloud computing is quite good for that. You can hire in a load of extra computer power, do the particular application that’s required and then scale it all back, only paying for what you use in the process," he said.
Walshe believes that in the future, the lines separating data analytics, the cloud and high performance computing types of technologies will blur.
"We’ll be able to create a high performance computing specific resource within the cloud. Rather than just saying ‘I need 1,000 machines to be provisioned so I can support my software as a service application,’ in the future you’ll be able to analyse your problem and be able to say ‘I need 1,000 cores, 75 terabytes of memory and 20 exobytes of storage, and I need a software-defined network that puts this in the following configuration.’ And you’ll get that," he said.
"You’ll be able to interrogate the cloud, see what resources are available through Amazon, Microsoft Azure or the Google app engine or whatever, asking the question ‘This is what I require, who can provide me with it?’ The various vendors will then generate a solution to provide that."
Terminology
Already the term ‘software-defined data centre’ is increasingly being used to describe the next generation of data centre products appearing on the market, but according to Douglas Loewe, managing director of Interxion Ireland, the term can mean different things to different people.
"Some people use the term to refer to the way the data centre is automated and run, and some people use it to refer to a data centre that is running Software as a Service (SaaS) which customers are accessing remotely," he said.
According to Loewe, there are three distinct types of companies in the data centre services industry. The first provides wholesale space, basic shell and core services and requires customers buying from them to have significant knowledge of how to run applications and monitor the technology that goes inside the data centre.
Secondly, there are traditional co-location service providers like Interxion which provide space, power, air conditioning and security, but which do not go up into the operating system and applications or servers themselves.
"That is the third category: managed services providers who provide the data centre but also the Windows or Linux-based servers-and potentially beyond that to Oracle database servers and so on-as well as the storage area networks and everything else that makes up an IP solution for the customer, and the people that monitor those services," he said.
"When we talk about a software defined data centre, the irony is that you can actually use that term in all three of those categories, and increasingly that’s what’s happening."
Legacy and the Cloud
According to Art Coughlan, data centre and cloud solution specialist at Microsoft Ireland, the challenge for companies interested in making the most of software-defined database services is figuring out how to marry legacy systems with cloud-based systems.
"Computing power, storage and bandwidth are becoming increasingly commoditised as the market grows, and it’s an option for users to consume them as a commodity and then add the value themselves if they want to," he said.
"It’s very easy to create an island of technology in the cloud-you can spin up machines and put significant amounts of storage out there, but the bigger question is how do you manage that? How do you integrate that with the technology within your own firewalls from an IT operations, security and compliance perspective?"
Coughlan believes that this is the key challenge to the enterprise, and it is where he feels Microsoft has a role to play.
"Software-defined networking and software-defined data centre, which are the popular industry terms for this, aren’t something that we promote explicitly but it is part of our cloud OS offering. It allows you to manage an operating system that doesn’t just live on one physical node or even on one virtual machine, and it allows you to do that at whatever scale that is required by your business without losing control or visibility," he said.
Microsoft has taken what it has learned from providing commercial-scale public cloud offerings and used that to help inform its enterprise class products.
"We can create complex multi-layered environments with absolute separation on a logical and physical level across many tenants on the same infrastructure, and we’ve created the intellectual property that allows that ourselves over the course of many years," said Coughlan.
"What we run on our public cloud is based entirely on our own software products, and we’ve migrated that intellectual property down the line into software products like Windows Server 2012. It integrates into our public cloud offering and allows you to seamlessly extend your networks, your management infrastructure and your server pool with the same identity layer. You don’t need to create a separate directory against which to validate users; you can use your current directory."
Two ways
As these kinds of possibilities grow, a familiar question arises, what is driving demand? Is it customer-led, built upon a growing appreciation of the benefits such customisation can offer, or is it driven by data centre owners keen to show off what they can do? Coughlan thinks both are factors.
"Clearly vendors try to ‘productise’ their offerings in this area to make them easier to understand. Software-as-a-service is the most mature cloud offering out there from a broad industry perspective and that’s forced productisation of an offering. To use the Henry Ford analogy, with SaaS you can have any colour you like as long as it’s black. You can have configuration but you can’t really have customisation," he said.
"If you take infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, which are newer to the market and a little less well understood, there can be a challenge because what you’re actually selling is a toolkit. Even though we in Microsoft do layer services on top of that toolkit, such as wallet services, multimedia services and big data Hadoop services-things that people will be familiar with-it’s still difficult to explain.
"So in my opinion, the answer here is that it’s a bit of both-a bit of the vendor setting the scene in trying to simplify the offering, and certain customers really seeing the value in the sum of the parts in a way that the vendor may not have thought is possible. The more things are commoditised, the more straightforward they become and the more apparent the cost benefit becomes."
Customer first
Loewe of Interxion Ireland believes that the real growth in interest in these technologies will come from customer demand.
"If you err, it’s better to err on the side of listening to the customer and what they want-you can then use the technology to facilitate what the customer’s business needs are. If you get too interested in the technology for its own sake, you potentially either over-engineer the solution or provide a solution that the customer doesn’t yet need," he said.
"The irony of the situation is that if you’re solving one customer’s problems then the odds are that your solution can also be applied to the business needs of other potential customers. It’s important not to lose sight of the fact that our role is to solve business problems for our customers. The technology is a means to an end."
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