The growth of software-defined storage in Africa means businesses can have a bigger storage pool with a single storage budget and can add storage resources at the scaled needed, as well as change their relationships with suppliers, says enterprise open-source services multinational SUSE Africa regional manager Matthew Lee.

The volume of transactional and general business data as part of daily operations is driving the strategic importance of storage to support these uses.

“Software-defined infrastructure can address the compute issues and legacy compute problems in South Africa. It breaks down the silos in traditional storage systems and allows for multiplatform storage to function seamlessly,” he says.

Open-source standards are ubiquitous in cloud and data centre systems, and the same benefits are now being demanded of storage, adds Lee.

“The pace of business and technology is changing the data centre, and many organisations need to review and implement new solutions to stay ahead, and, in some cases, catch up. More than 95% of enterprises believe software-defined infrastructure is the future of the data centre.”

SUSE’s OpenStack cloud and enterprise storage systems are important components of software-defined infrastructure and, together with the company’s enterprise support Select Services, provide clients with a cost-effective and flexible way of using software-defined infrastructure technologies.

Organisations can become more agile and economically efficient by leveraging digital assets and information, as many depend on the high availability and responsiveness of their enterprise information technology (IT) systems. Business-critical computing infrastructure solutions can provide nonstop IT and workload predictability. Therefore, a trusted relationship with dedicated experts ensures long-term success for clients, he states.

“Uptime and predictability in the enterprise data centre are essential for clients to satisfy the demands of business-critical workloads. In turn, they are able to meet the demands of their own customers more effectively by quickly adapting to changing market conditions and improving efficiency.”

Additionally, Lee notes that hardware licence and refresh cycles provide an opportune time to exit vendor and licence lock-in models and transition to open standards-based architectures. SUSE has significant experience in designing these systems, which can also integrate proprietary storage systems and help companies to use all their existing assets, while positioning themselves to use new and bespoke offerings that suit their businesses best.

Software-defined systems enable companies to use hardware as a commodity, which, in turn, enable them to scale much more rapidly and organically.

“Our solution manages the balancing of storage resources and the data, meaning that our solution is self-healing and, thereby, improves the robustness and flexibility of storage.”

Further, the company maintains a strong and active presence in open-source communities, which supports rapid and continuous developments.