Software Defined Architecture : The Way For True Scalability

Software defined architectures bring together all the control systems of a data center to ensure integration at the base of scalability. Gartner™s Yefim V. Natis, VP & Fellow, has mentioned about a new enterprise architectural style which is on rise – Software-Defined Architecture (SDA). Scalability was more related to pure cloud computing before. Rackspace OnMetal Server suddenly brought many changes. This is the first time, the common man who used to pay $200 per month for Cloud Server, understood what makes Google to Microsoft’s websites so much stable. As we have mentioned before, Rackspace’s current offerings are kind of first generation of software defined services. The software defined architectures seem to be the right way to go to ensure the scalability and efficiency needed to manage a world of information and information that is increasingly focused on the full convergence of the digital world with the physical world.

Software Defined Architecture : Primer

A convergence that will take even more space with the emergence of Internet of Things, Internet of Things should finally unite under one great mantle the natural and physical world in which man lives with the digital world to exchange information, data and much more. Developments in the IoT can not therefore disregard an always helpful and efficient operational scalability, since in the absence of such a condition, the whole system would fail. IoT will amplify the problems related to licensing, provisioning, managing and storing data from and processed by the connected objects; and then we will see an increase in the burden on IT departments. In this context, the software defined architectures seem to be the only way which is able to meet the emerging challenges of the scalability of the data center and possibly can ensure the need of future economic markets and different business exception.

Software Defined Architecture : Defined Only By Integration

Software defined architecture only intended to resolve the inability of scalability, trying to shift the burden of managing and provisioning from people to technology. In order to fulfill this difficult task, software defined architectures need to aim for integration of the processes. Indeed, it is important to become able to dispose an automated way to provide the network resources, computing and storage space necessary to meet the performance expectations of the users, but this is actually the last step of an entire process, which consists of whole a series of preventive analysis.

The workloads have different characteristics and each operation needs to be carried out optimally. This means that to provision a workload in a VM with features that are not suitable can only lead to poor performance, which could impact the entire platform and all the processes. Software defined architectures will be capable of reasoning about the data and the characteristics of individual workloads and rely on the information provided by several components in a data center, which tend to integrate and collaborate with each other to ensure the scalability of which we talked about at the beginning.

For the purposes of scalability it is also important to know the location of a clustered workload within the entire data center, so as to offer an amount of resources which is also non-contiguously sufficient to ensure high availability.

The next evolutionary step of the cloud (in addition to the creation of value-added services) is therefore a more intelligent provisioning, driven by continuous feedback issued by all control systems, network resources, storage and computing, which must be virtually integrated under the auspices of software defined architecture.