Software-Defined Infrastructure Providers

The multi-cloud tsunami that is swirling around the data center environment is only growing, with nearly every vendor in the space staking out their ground as the must-have solution for the latest iteration of massive data set computing.

While the cloud continues to chart strong growth, reports of the death of on-prem architecture have proven to be premature. In fact, more than one vendor has noted a minor, but notable retreat of some workloads off the cloud, and back to the speed, and reliable cost of an on-premise data center.

As application builders employ larger, more complex data sets to build machine learning models the processing, storage, security and power demands of these enterprise workloads are only getting bigger.

Additionally, the lessons vendors learned during the COVID-19 pandemic around securing and provisioning thousands of remote environments through the cloud are not going away, as the work from home movement that was largely enabled by the data center, has not abated as quickly as the virus that caused it.

The software-defined data center vendors below are driven by automation, pooling resources and virtualization to make their customers’ environments more agile and flexible. The customer-buying trend toward data center infrastructure and software as-a-service is fueling growth in the hybrid cloud era.

Consolidation is also driving business decisions as massive players in hardware and software look to combinations that can unlock new value.

Here, CRN breaks down 25 software-defined data center infrastructure vendors that are shaping the new multi-cloud world.