The modern data centre is built on three fundamental blocks, virtualisation, modern storage and cloud technologies.
Having these elements, and the supporting infrastructure, such as networking, in software makes it easy to programmatically provision, configure and de-provision based on business needs.
That’s according to Charles Clarke, APAC Technical Director, Veeam, who when offering industry insight into software-defined data centres, believes the key business need in the global market is to be always on, that is to say, strive to provide high performance services 24x7.
Defining software-defined data centres as automation, Clarke says Veeam develops software for the modern data centre, providing software-defined data protection to the market.
“We fit well with other data centre elements defined in software,” he adds. “We support tools for software defined data centres, such as Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation platform, VMware vSphere and vCloud Suite.”
Clarke says Veeam “actively uses” software defined data centres too, with the company’s Australian division defining many services in software, including data centres that it uses for extensive testing for local pre and post-sales functions.
“More importantly,” he adds, “virtualised data centres provide the foundation for it’s demonstration lab which plays a critical revenue raising function for Veeam’s sales team.”
Key advantages of such an approach, according to Clarke, focus on “dynamism and agility,”
“The ability for an organisation to quickly provide services allows for a faster response to market demands,” he adds.
“It also uncovers cost savings through elasticity, just-in-time and on-demand provisioning.
“Easier data recovery and management is a critical benefit. Virtualisation, a central building block for the software defined data centre, allows vendors like Veeam to build solutions that are purpose-made for data protection in these highly dynamic environments.”
Evolution path for Software Defined Data centres
Like many industry experts, Clarke believes the software defined data centre will evolve towards deeper cloud integration, both with public and hybrid cloud providers.
Furthermore, better infrastructure will eventually mean that entire data centres will be portable, making it easier to migrate entire data centres from on-premise to cloud and between different providers.
Closer to home across New Zealand, Clarke says when it comes to end-users adopting software defined data centres, and IT-as-a-Service, a logical early step has been Backup-as-a-Service and Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service.
“Veeam have been at the forefront of enabling ITaaS providers to protect user data and archive to offsite locations, ensuring organisations can rapidly and reliably recover data,” he adds.
But as Clarke attests, Veeam is not a service provider, but an enabler for service providers.
“Cloud ProPartners use Veeam to deliver a range of data protection and monitoring services focused around Disaster Recovery as a Service and Backup as a Service,” he explains.
“This helps Veeam partners’ customers achieve the 3-2-1 rule of data protection: three copies of data (including one in production) on two different media, one of which should be offsite.