IBM has expanded its portfolio of software-defined infrastructure solutions adding cognitive features to speed up analysis of data, integrate Apache Spark and help accelerate research and design, the company claims.

The new offering will be called IBM Spectrum Computing and is designed to aide companies to extract full value from their data through adding scheduling capabilities to the infrastructure layer. The product offers workload and resource management features to research scientists for high-performance research, design and simulation applications. The new proposition focuses on three areas.

Firstly, Spectrum Computing works with cloud applications and open source frameworks to assist in sharing resources between the programmes to speed up analysis. Secondly, the company believes it makes the adoption of Apache Spark simpler. And finally, the ability to share resources will accelerate research and design by up to 150 times, IBM claims.

By incorporating the cognitive computing capabilities into the software-defined infrastructure products, IBM believes the concept on the whole will become more ‘intelligent’. The scheduling competencies of the software will increase compute resource utilization and predictability across multiple workloads.

The software-defined data centre has been steadily growing, and is forecasted to continue its healthy growth over the coming years. Research has highlighted the market could be worth in the region of $77.18 Billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 28.8% from 2015 to 2020. The concept on the whole is primarily driven by the attractive feature of simplified scalability as well as the capability of interoperability. North America and Asia are expected to hold the biggest market share worldwide, though Europe as a region is expected to grow at a faster rate.

“Data is being generated at tremendous rates unlike ever before, and its explosive growth is outstripping human capacity to understand it, and mine it for business insights,” said Bernard Spang, VP for IBM Software Defined Infrastructure. “At the core of the cognitive infrastructure is the need for high performance analytics of both structured and unstructured data. IBM Spectrum Computing is helping organizations more rapidly adopt new technologies and achieve greater, more predictable performance.”