According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Software-Defined Infrastructure Tracker, the worldwide software-defined infrastructure (SDI) software market reached $6,5-billion during the first half of the year in 2021, a 10,7% increase from same period in 2020.
The three technology pillars that make up the SDI market are software-defined compute software (54% of total market value), software-defined storage controller software (35% of total market value), and software-defined networking software (10% of total market value).
“Following a challenging year in 2020 when heavy business uncertainty weighed on results, at least by historical performance standards, the SDI market fared much better during the first half of this year,” says Greg Macatee, senior research analyst: Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC.
“We observed acceleration in the SDI market as enterprises have started to return to more normal IT spending patterns and invest in software-defined technologies to transform and modernise their datacentres.”
Software-defined infrastructure (SDI) refers to logically pooled resources of compute, memory, storage, and networking, which are managed by software with minimal human intervention. SDI systems are independent of the underlying hardware, as long as the hardware meets certain technical specifications. The underlying hardware in SDI systems are industry-standard, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products that have enterprise-grade certifications.
Software-defined compute (SDC) software virtualises groups of physical compute nodes into a single logical compute resource. This abstraction of physical resources allows computations to occur in any COTS hardware that is part of the logical pool of resources. SDC is implemented at various layers of the software stack and can be used in public/private clouds and virtualised environments.
Software-defined storage controller software (SDS-CS) represents a complete storage software stack that delivers a full suite of storage services in conjunction with COTS hardware to create a complete storage system.
Network virtualisation and SDN controller software is made up of network virtualisation overlays and SDN controllers used in datacenter networks. Both overlays and controllers bring alternate SDN architectures to the network, supporting multiple protocols and southbound/northbound interfaces/APIs.