How Composable Infrastructure Can Help Companies Adopt Cloud Practices

Read original article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2020/10/13/how-composable-infrastructure-can-help-companies-adopt-cloud-practices/

Enterprises often want their private data centers to work like public cloud services — easy to scale, flexible, agile — and with more predictable costs.

Emerging frameworks such as composable infrastructures, a framework my company offers, can facilitate the data center transition from traditional practices to more cost-effective private cloud practices. Composable infrastructure uses software to abstract compute, storage and networking resources and makes them readily available as cloud services — on the fly. As with the cloud model, resources are aggregated into pools that the enterprise can then provision to meet the needs of its workload.

While adopting a fully composable infrastructure framework can take years, there is no requirement to go “all in.” Most enterprises start moving to composable one element at a time, and one of the easiest and best candidates for that first step is storage infrastructure.

Applications And Industries

Storage is a critical element in accelerating applications that are putting a great deal of strain on traditional infrastructures. Think edge computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and more.

These and other data-intensive applications collect, store and use previously unprecedented amounts of data. IT departments need these types of applications, but they must adapt to take advantage of them. That’s when implementing a composable infrastructure can help, particularly in the following industries and for the reasons cited:

• Financial services: Financial services, banking and hedge fund companies use composable infrastructure because they process large, growing amounts of sensitive data. By doing so, they can help avoid disruptions and the resulting monetary loss. Research firm MarketsandMarkets cites financial services as the industry it expects to be the largest segment moving to composable infrastructure today.

• Healthcare: Innovations in healthcare IoT, medical devices for monitoring patients, telecare and electronic health record (EHR) systems can be challenging for healthcare IT. Managers face limitations in moving their workloads to the cloud due to security and compliance. Composable infrastructure can help them remain agile through on-premise solutions for efficiency and lowered costs.

• Service Providers: As data grows in complexity, more organizations are turning to managed services providers (MSPs) to manage hybrid clouds and data on their behalf. In turn, those MSPs are exploring composable storage models so they can quickly scale storage infrastructure to meet the performance and capacity needs of their customers.

The Highlights And Challenges

While storage is clearly a great candidate for implementing a composable architecture, other areas can certainly benefit too by making many of the data center’s resources as available as cloud services.

Other benefits include that with composable architectures, data center resources are unencumbered by the underlying physical infrastructure and are more fluid; this helps ensure agility, independent scalability and elasticity for changing workload needs. Meanwhile, performance can be accelerated and remote composable resources can often outperform local resources, including local storage.

With a composable infrastructure, organizations can also provision and control their data center resources regardless of where they are physically located — more completely and immediately — with software-defined intelligence.

Like any IT undertaking, some enterprises will experience roadblocks. For many companies, moving to a composable architecture using software-defined storage represents a significant shift in infrastructure architecture and requires a reimagining of how infrastructure is deployed and managed. Moreover, results do not happen overnight, nor are they free. Implementation takes time and requires a short-term investment for the promise of potential longer-term ROI. Those are some of the reasons why it makes sense to start with easy projects.

Composing Storage

As I mentioned at the outset, a good place to break out of traditional storage and into the composable infrastructure framework is by moving to disaggregated, software-defined storage. Traditional storage comes in different versions, including high-latency, low-bandwidth storage — things you might associate with disks. Today, those are already largely composable with help from commercial products, including storage area networks (SANs). There also are open source projects like Ceph that are helpful for disaggregating storage but may not meet the criteria of performing like local storage.

For high-speed, high-throughput, low-latency storage, there is a lot of room for growth when you use composable infrastructures. Adoption is happening now thanks to commercial solutions, as well as open-source NVMe/TCP drivers and targets that can get you part of the way there today. Solutions like these can help companies clearly build a path for recouping their total cost of ownership (TCO). This is in part because they often use software on standard servers and on existing networks and can work within legacy and cloud-scale environments.

Selecting the right composable architecture solution typically boils down to some simple questions:

• What levels of scalability are needed now and in the future?
• Will the existing compute and network infrastructure be used, or will there be a forklift upgrade?
• What applications will run on this infrastructure, and what data services do they require?
• What are the performance requirements?
• Are there any special security needs?
• What are the budget constraints?

Testing The Possibilities

IT budgets are continually stretched thin, so choosing the right composable infrastructure and testing it in an area such as storage is worth a look. After all, who does not want to improve their ROI by getting the most out of their existing infrastructure while providing flexibility and agility needed to support a variety of workloads on the same infrastructure?

Composable Infrastructure Market Update

Mordor Intelligence estimates that the market will grow from $6.90B in 2024 to $18.01B by 2029, with a CAGR of 21.16% during the forecast period. Digital transformation initiatives, particularly in regions like Asia-Pacific, are expanding their adoption, while advancements in AI-driven automation and orchestration promise to enhance their capabilities further. Composable infrastructure vendors, such as Dell and Lightbits Luminary partner Lenovo, are major players.

Source: Mordor Intelligence Research & Advisory. (2024, August). Composable Infrastructure Market Size & Share Analysis – Growth Trends & Forecasts (2024 – 2029). Mordor Intelligence. Retrieved December 20, 2024, from https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/composable-infrastructure-market