Software that runs on top of servers is in a major crossroad

Recently, while researching in enterprise servers and data centers space, I found everybody is talking about a new term 'composable infrastructure'. Now, I was mugging up a good deal around Converged Infrastructure, Converged Platforms and Hyper-converged, when this buzz struck my ear drums. Unfortunately however, very few tech sources or agencies could tell what exactly composable infrastructure is, and hence, I decided to dig deeper and discuss the subject with few of my company's tech experts to get a bit of clarity. 

The whole story begins with the fact that the servers of the past are not being able to meet the demands of this new generation of workloads where IT is looked up to as a game-changer for competitive differentiation. The enterprise server hardware market has showcased not much changes over the years, as the basic server building block has almost been the same in the last two decades. The complex, siloed infrastructure was originally designed to help reduce costs for traditional applications and architectures, and are not equipped to drive the degree of flexibility and efficiency required for next-gen applications that are the focal points to business success. Hence, in order to stay agile and adapt to the changes in today's digital economy, companies like Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel are introducing a new category of products called composable infrastructure. While converged infrastructure refers to an integrated stack of compute, storage and networking with a unified management layer, and hyperconverged systems create pools of compute and storage through a single clustered node, composable architecture represents disaggregated pools of compute, storage and network fabric, all controlled by a single management layer.  All of the resources are software defined so you have the ability to compose and decompose single sets or blocks of compute, storage, and networking components for a particular application, regardless of the locations of switches, or the framework of CPUs or disks. One of the major benefits being cited by the vendors promoting this technology is cost-effectiveness in total IT infrastructure setup, because this technology is designed to treat hardware like software by allowing IT to manage “infrastructure as code” which in turn, lets you know the right amount of infrastructure resources. Moreover, it also adds flexibility in case of necessity of change in resources, and pacify rolling out of business-critical applications into the market. 

The market is still in its infancy and we can expect to see a lot more buzz around composable infrastructure in 2016. Several vendors, including HP Enterprise and Cisco are just bringing their first generation composable infrastructure products to market and as of now, promoting the concept just as a channel for internal IT departments to facilitate workloads quickly and efficiently. However going forward, I am sure the major infrastructure players like Cisco, Dell, EMC, IBM, Lenovo, Oracle and VCE will try to prove the long-term total cost of ownership benefits of composable infrastructure solutions when compared to traditional datacenter infrastructure architectures if they have to trigger interests from IT infrastructure leaders. Driving the risk-averse enterprise IT units to adopt a new technology which at this moment has perceptions of increasing IT complexity, will be a challenging task. Nevertheless, this can be seen as a major transformation in the server industry and the CIOs and line-of-business executives should start evaluating the competitive advantages of the new hyper-connected enterprise.