Oracle Invests in Software Defined Networking

Oracle’s investment in Corente supports the growing market consolidation around “software defined” technologies. These are solutions that replace the traditional proprietary infrastructure hardware with commodity hardware powered by software, reducing the total cost of ownership and improving flexibility. The “software defined networking” market shot to the headlines in 2012 when VMWare paid $1.26B for Nicira, driving buzz around other software defined technologies, including “software defined storage” and the “software defined data center”. For Tarmin, software defined storage is of greatest interest due to its storage focus.

Software Defined Storage

To a great extent, storage has always been defined by software, it’s just that the software has typically been embedded into proprietary hardware platforms, whereas now, it is abstracted to commodity hardware through storage virtualization software that, again, reduces TCO and enhances infrastructure flexibility.

Data Defined Storage

Tarmin plays in the related but separate category of Data Defined Storage. As per Steve Duplessie, “The current non-standard definition of ‘software defined’ is misdirected from the outset – because it remains focused on driving value from the infrastructure in versus from the data out. And that’s why I think we should consider the concept of data defined versus software defined as the core of what we’re really trying to drive here… If the data is the core of everything, then building IT strategies that emanate outward from the data itself is only logical.”

Media Independent Data Storage

Software defined storage can be mapped to only the first core innovation pillar that Data Defined Storage provides; Media Independent Data Storage. With unstructured data growing at its current rates, reducing the TCO of storage is tables stakes to play in the storage market, so a focus on moving to commodity hardware and removing traditional proprietary costs is essential. This is where software defined storage players stop.

Innovation Pillars

However, Data Defined Storage brings two other key innovations. Once the cost of storing data has been addressed, it is necessary to deliver end-to-end data governance, protection, security and mobility across storage, servers, and smart devices to reduce business risk through the second pillar, Data Security and Identity Management. The third pillar, the Distributed Metadata Repository, is focused on collecting the value of the data across distributed data stores, allowing organizations to not only save money on storage and reduce risk, but to monetize the data to gain business agility and improve decision making.

Data Centricity

These three pillars are held together by the Data Centric Management, which allows organizations to turn their growing unstructured data stores into sources of value to the business to drive sustainable competitive advantage. Ultimately, it is these factors that differentiate Tarmin and Data Defined Storage from the software defined infrastructure movement and delivers enhanced business value.