Software-defined data centres a luxury? Not for service providers that need it, claims HP

But even those that have a SDDC have difficulty getting to grips with how it functions as part of the overarching business

Software-defined data centres (SDDCs) are not a luxury for service providers that "need it", according to Clive Freeman, chief technologist at HP's enterprise group in the UK.

Freeman was responding to a question from the audience during Computing's web seminar titled ‘The software-defined data centre: why, how and when'.

He claimed that although SDDCs were not for every business, certain industries and types of businesses would benefit from the technology.

"It might be [a luxury] if you don't need it, but if you need it then you really need it. You look at service providers who need it, they are not doing it because it's a fun layer to put on top of what they have, they're doing it because they manage tens of thousands of machines and in order to do that you need enabling technologies, and so they are getting real returns from it," Freeman suggested.

"Is it an environment that everyone finds themselves in? Certainly not if you're an SME," he added.

But Freeman insisted that SMEs would eventually benefit from software-defined data centres.

"People who are using SDDCs today are at an advantage, and those advantages will eventually trickle down the tree to smaller enterprises," he said.

But even the businesses that deploy software-defined data centres will take a while to get to grips with it, according to Freeman, who cited one end user's experience as an example.

"The [end user] managed to get its server build time from 30 days to 45 minutes so it made a massive saving and that was great, but the end user said it still took 30 days to get on with the project because the project had to be signed off and it needed policy accreditation. So it's just one cog in the machine, we think it's the whole world because we live in IT but it's just one part of the business," he said.

Computing's Data Centre & Infrastructure Summit 2014 is on September 24 and is free for end-users to attend. For the agenda and more information, please click here.