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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Why the Software Defined Data Center is Changing IT

At VMworld this week I was able to sit in a session that talked about a project to take a global bank from 17% virtualization to the Software Defined Data Center. The driver was pretty simple, take their 5 billion in IT spend and cut it in half. Easy right?

While virtualization is an obvious part of the equation, virtualization alone was not going to cut the budget in half. In order to speed the deployment of applications and increase agility for the business, a more commoditized approach to IT was necessary. The business needed to be able to consume IT on demand, with automated processes for every part of the service.

The approach was revolutionary in every way. Instead of deploying traditional storage systems, servers, and even data centers, they built a commodity based infrastructure that could scale at very low cost with little to know warning. They approach is designed to change everything about the way they do IT including staff roles, and budgeting. This approach would allow them to reduce their IT costs by almost 70%.


There were a lot of different technologies involved in achieving this, some of it still beta, but the results were real and validated by several independent financial and technical institutions (think Gartner etc, although I can't recall the exact companies, so don't quote me on that). More details about this solution will become available as they continue to move more into production but the results are a great example of what private cloud enables, especially with a software defined approach to everything. 

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