| | January 20159CIOReviewAttach Storage (DAS), IT began to realize greater efficiency and agility benefits ­ even in what could be described as loosely con-structed infrastructure technology silos.The advent of virtualization and now the software-defined en-terprise has played a big part in helping transform IT and has be-gun breaking down technology silos in the datacenter. With newer workloads and continued innovation coming from the open source community, there is an increased emphasis on software-based shared storage and network automation resulting in virtual resourc-es that reside anywhere in a network or cloud (private, public or hybrid).The software-defined storage movement can take much of its credit from SANs. These shared storage solutions have become more affordable and versatile as they can handle many of the most complex workloads in the enterprise datacenter today. The busi-ness trends impacting this software-defined movement include:· The explosion of structured and unstructured data and the need to store, recover, and archive this information. · The emergence of newer applications comprised of big data, mo-bile, and social use cases. Along with these applications, hybrid cloud-based IaaS solutions are being adopted across a broad range of vertical markets to replace on-premise infrastructure.· The availability of broadband and Internet speeds affording enter-prises the ability to distribute their workforces in a global manner.In addition to these macro trends, the rise of mobility and so-cial media are fueling the need for a more efficient way to man-age this data storage. Cloud and social media organizations have helped pioneer software-defined storage through the desire to drive down costs by developing and maintaining the entire infrastructure stack on their own. It became an easier method for showcasing the value of this approach or to start offering software-based services through the cloud. Mobility and social media go hand-in-hand, causing the rapid increase in distributed data that must be analyzed by enterprises for competitive and regulatory reasons. As a result, industry researchers such as IDC expect the software-defined storage market to become the de facto mechanism for designing, delivering, and consuming data. According to IDC, commercial software-defined revenue will likely exceed $1.8 billion by 2015.Embracing Software Defined Storage and Delivering ITaaSAt CSC, we are helping our clients achieve ITaaS along the jour-ney to the 3rd Platform and beyond. Among the many solutions we deliver to our clients are a broad range of cloud, big data, mobility, cyber, datacenter, and networking offerings designed to increase IT infrastructure capacity, ROI, and performance. Together with our strategic technology partners such as EMC, we offer Storage-as-a-Service solutions that provide the scale and cost efficiencies needed to store, recover, and archive massive amounts of distributed business-critical data. And by integrating EMC's ViPR technology with server and network automation, CSC solutions are optimized for virtual, big data, mobile, and social en-vironments helping organizations transform IT through a software-defined enterprise.Software-based solutions are now entering the storage and networking domains leading to an era of the software-defined enterpriseJames Hanley
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