Executive Summary
The enterprise IT infrastructure market is undergoing a once-in-a-generation change due to ongoing digital transformation initiatives and the onslaught of applications and data. The need for speed, agility, and efficiency is pushing demand for modern datacenter technologies (and architectures) that can lower costs while providing new levels of scale, quality, and operational efficiency. This has driven strong demand for next-generation solutions such as software-defined storage/networking/compute, public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), flashbased storage systems, and hyperconverged infrastructure. Each of these solutions offers enterprise IT departments a way to rethink how they deploy, manage, consume, and refresh IT infrastructure. These solutions represent modern infrastructure that can deliver the performance and agility required for both existing virtualized workloads and next-generation applications — applications that are cloud-native, highly dynamic, and built using containers and microservices architectures. As we enter the next phase of datacenter modernization, businesses need to leverage newer capabilities enabled by software-defined storage (SDS) that help them eliminate management complexities, overcome data fragmentation and growth challenges, and become a data-driven organization to propel innovation. IDC believes that as enterprises embark on their core datacenter modernization initiatives with compelling technologies, they should evaluate enterprise-grade solutions that redefine storage and data architectures designed for the demands of the digital-native economy. Digital transformation is a technology-based business strategy that is becoming increasingly imperative for success. However, unless infrastructure provisioning evolves to suit new application requirements, IT will not be viewed as a business enabler. IDC believes that those organizations that do not leverage proven technologies such as SDS to evolve their datacenters truly risk losing their competitive edge.
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