If you thought 2013 was a big year in the world of “ Software Defined ,” brace yourself for 2014.  Both Gartner and Forrester Research called out Software Defined as a top 10 strategic technology trend for 2014. A new era of workloads, which we at IBM call Systems of Engagement, is driving this IT transformation to Software Defined Environments (SDE) . Workloads such as mobile , social , and big data & analytics – often delivered via cloud computing  – are disrupting today’s IT infrastructures with crushing complexity, rapid demand cycles and accelerating business requirements. SDE helps organizations address this pain through simplified, responsive and adaptive infrastructure solutions. Automation is at the core of SDE – think of SDE as being the next generation automation in cloud computing environments. SDE enables business users to describe their requirements of the IT environment in a systematic way that in turn drives automation of the infrastructure . Whether it’s deploying new workloads on optimal resources, reconfiguring infrastructure to ensure service objectives, leveraging off-premise clouds for extra capacity, or accelerating software deployment using patterns, automation with SDE is the key for ensuring cost-effectiveness, performance levels and speed. And it’s all based on IT policies and business rules.  At Pulse 2014 , from February... [Continue Reading]

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IBM recently announced  Power Virtualization Center (PowerVC) to simplify virtualization management and extend the capabilities of IBM Power Systems . PowerVC unleashes the strengths of IBM Power Systems core platform virtualization through IBM’s collaboration with OpenStack .   The technologies and broad ecosystem that OpenStack brings are driven by a large community of commercial companies and developers with the mission to provide a ubiquitous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud management platform. This is a huge step forward that will enable you to increase your utilization of the platform and gain greater agility and responsiveness to the increasing changes and demands being placed on your IT infrastructure . But Wait, there’s more! PowerVC is also a key enabler for Power Systems within a Software Defined Environment (SDE). Software defined environments represent a significant and important transformation in IT infrastructure virtualization. A Software Defined Environment uses virtualization to express hardware resources as manageable software entities and to control them with advanced programmed automation. Resource virtualization has reached the point where it applies to all foundational elements of IT infrastructure: servers , storage and network . These elements can be effectively virtualized to present logical projections of the physical resources they represent. They can be dynamically... [Continue Reading]

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Today’s leading organizations face immense pressure to stay agile and responsive to rapidly-changing, highly competitive business environments. The emergence of cloud , big data , mobile and social is forcing organizations to rethink the way they do business. In order to quickly and effectively respond to these dynamic market forces, organizations must design an IT infrastructure that is flexible and resilient. Organizations need a new approach to automating IT infrastructures to make them simplified, adaptive and responsive . Software Defined Environment (SDE) to the rescue! A Software Defined Environment brings the next generation of automation that easily integrates cloud, mobile, social and big data workloads into the existing business operations A Software Defined Environment is optimized to deliver the agility, efficiency and performance needed for today’s workloads In my previous blog , I discussed about the growing value of Software Defined Environments in businesses. In this blog, let’s take a look at how SDE is the infrastructure enabler for today’s workloads. Here are a couple of simple examples: An enterprise solution is gradually being migrated to Cloud . The plan is to incrementally deploy the solution through develop to deploy lifecycle. The SDE approach can be utilized here to define business rules to allocate the required compute, storage and network resources as required by each phase of the deployment SDE is... [Continue Reading]

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Data Centers today have to manage and mine massive volumes of data. Data that seems to be growing at the speed of light and data that is coming from disparate sources. All this can be very complex to manage and very expensive to maintain – for hardware, software, networking in the least. So many organizations are leaning towards moving data centers to Cloud environments to benefit from the shared services concepts and multiple deployment models. Cloud deployment models also leverage the advances in storage and server virtualization and provide these resources to cater to the dynamic systems demands for the organizations. But the market needs are rapidly changing and thus demands are outpacing the system performance. Even with all the advances made in cloud technologies, the increasing complexity of the solution deployments and system demands are creating bottlenecks. There seems to be an ever increasing need for streamlining and smarter delivery of shared services to make data centers more dynamic and flexible. The organizations are seeking ‘workload automation and optimization’ and are typically asking for the following: Workloads:  requirement to dynamically assign resources to application based on their needs and best available resources.   Open APIs:  The enterprises deploy solutions based on a broad spectrum of solution providers. So there is a stronger demand for a programmable infrastructure based on Open APIs.   Continuous... [Continue Reading]

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