SiliconANGLE has been talking about a new trend called Software-led Infrastructure, also know as software-defined datacenter. It’s now a formal research and editorial topic at SiliconANGLE and Wikibon.org.

Software-led Infrastructure is a new phenom that is taking the notion of converged infrastrastructure and modernizing it to add new technologies like flash and new virtualized software tech.

One area that software defined or led infrastructure is impacting is databases. Specifically, new software infrastructure models are contributing to both lower IT costs and improved application delivery and flexibility for the business.

According a Wikibon report released last night, using Software-led Infrastructure (SLI) principles will allow databases to be run at significantly lower cost and with improved flexibility. For example, in a traditional database deployment a typical database environment using Oracle Standard Edition will be at least 30% more expensive to run than in a Software-led Infrastructure environment.

The graph, provided by Wikibon, below shows the hard cost overall savings from changing a traditional physical deployment to a SLI deployment. The database license cost is 88% of the cost in a traditonal physical database deployment.

Figure 1 – The Business Case for Software-led Infrastructure for Database Environments.     Source: Wikibon 2012

Reduction of Footprint – Big Savings on Oracle Licence

Reduction in footprint is a big advantage for software-defined datacenter technology and business models. In the software-defined datacenter models using Software-led Infrastructure principles allows for companies to leverage virtualization, more expensive severs, and blazing fast storage to reduce the number of cores by 33%.

This means that CIOs can reduce Oracle licenses on servers being displaced and can use that savings to pay for a modern software-led refresh. That is a good deal and positions companies for the future rather than being extorted by the past business models.

According to the Wikibon report, the reduction in additional Oracle Standard Edition licenses costs pays for the full cost of the enhanced servers and storage twice over. The hardware and a backup system come for free!

According to Wikibon here is their advice to CIOs running datacenters with an eye toward the cloud.

CIOs should ensure the alignment of objectives by ensuring some level of database software license responsibility within the IT operations budget. Moving to a full Software-led Infrastructure should be clearly set as a long-term objective. This should include the ability to migrate suitable workloads to the cloud if financially attractive. All database software that is certified for virtualization should be run on an optimized environment, to include suitable virtualization tools, optimized servers and storage. In time this should include automated operations.