With increased demands on IT services and reduced budgets, organisations are often forced to get as much value from their infrastructure as possible. This can mean using all of the available features of a piece of kit to deliver functionality when provisioning new solutions.
Most vendors are not interested in sharing their technology and often opt to increase market share by offering functionality that only works within their own hardware or software offerings. These can be difficult or even impossible to integrate with other vendors technologies.
In the short term, they give you a comprehensive feature set to work with but in the longer term they tie you into their own ecosystem. This can cause changes to become complex and expensive which could restrict an organisations ability to innovate.
With technology moving at an ever increasing pace, organisation will encounter this problem ever more frequently.
One way to deal with this is to compartmentalise the functionality. This can be achieved by not using the in built feature set of your infrastructure but instead breaking these features out using independent products. These can then be easily added, scaled or replaced when technology or business needs change.
Modularity is not a new concept but has been used at a data centre and infrastructure level to address capacity issues when scaling out services. It offers a high degree of control over how services are provisioned as well as reducing the costs and risks associated with making changes to your infrastructure.
By taking this concept down to the feature level, it allows you to introduce new or enhanced functionality to your solutions without compromising performance or availability.