Software-led infrastructure is something we follow closely at SiliconAngle, given software’s importance in the data center for smarter, more efficient processes and cost savings.  While this concept grows in popularity, the term is less than buzzworthy. But EMC may have changed the software’s not-so-sexy stigma on Wall Street with last week’s financial analyst meeting and launch of Pivotal, a joint initiative with subsidiary VMware.  Pivotal is a breakthrough concept that combines assets from EMC and VMware with the goal of building the big data platform for developers. Business model-wise, the initiative represents a bold move to compete with other big data platforms from Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM, Intel, Wandisco and others.

In addition, the news has brought a fresh focus on software and VMware’s theme of the software defined data center. Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante discussed the latest news from the software-led infrastructure space, and what it all means for the industry, on this morning’s SiliconAngle NewsDesk segment with Kristin Feledy.

Vellante describes the software-driven approach as “extracting the functionality that exists within infrastructure, unlocking it and making it run on commodity hardware” – or in other words, doing what VMware did for compute in the storage and networking layers.

The analyst goes on to say that it was Google and Facebook, the pioneers of hyperscale computing, who first realized the advantages of software-led infrastructure. This methodology turned into a full-blown trend when VMware acquired Nicira last year, and made it clear for CIOs that abstraction is the future of the data center.

“There’s so much pressure on CIOs to improve efficiency and improve flexibility,” says Vellante.  “So you have confluence of  huge data volumes with big data, you have the Amazon or Google effect where traditional enterprise IT buyers are seeing that these web giants can actually delivering massive improvements in productivity in terms of IT management, and then there is this other opportunity of creating value through data and speed to market. The only way to really pursue that is to break this decades-long hold that we’ve had with regard to function being locked within in infrastructure and turn to a software-led approach.”

Vellante then lists three recent developments in this emerging market: EMC’s hush-hush Project Bourne, Fusion-io’s acquisition of ID7, and the debut of Melio5 from Sanbolic. Project Bourne is an upcoming data center management platform that’s meant to keep EMC, the largest traditional storage vendor in the industry, ahead of the market. Vellante says it’s a strong vision to provide EMC’s data, volume and storage management stack as a set of software services running on commodity (as well as EMC) hardware. Vellante says that even though EMC President and CFO David Goulden promised delivery in the second half of ’13, the expectation is the capability will be rolled out in waves over time.

ID7 in turn is a UK-based firm that specializes in optimizing software for different hardware interfaces. Vellante asserts that the acquisition by Fusion-io brings a couple of advantages, namely the ability to share and product data residing on Fusion-io products across a scale out infrastructure and, importantly, critical Linux expertise. The analyst believes Fusion-io is leading improvements in the Linux operating system to better accommodate flash as a memory extension.

Meanwhile, Melio5 is what Vellante calls “mainframe-class storage software:” a set of services in an abstraction layer that does away with the complexity of heterogeneous storage environments. He says Sanbolic is the best example he knows of a company truly pursuing software-defined storage that is delivering a comprehensive set of products today.

See Vellante’s entire segment below: