The Software Defined Era

In the last couple of years the business is constantly asking IT departments how the public cloud can provide services that are faster, cheaper and more flexible than the in house solutions. I’m not going to argue with you if this is right or not, it is what I hear at most of my customers and in a couple of cases the answer seams to be automation. The next-gen data centers that leverage a software-defined foundation, use high levels of automation to control and coordinate the environment, enabling service delivery that will meet business requirements today and tomorrow.

For me the software-defined data center (SDDC) provides an infrastructure foundation that is highly automated for delivering IT resources at the moment they are needed. The strength of  SDDC is the idea of abstracting the hardware and enabling its functionality in software. Due to the power of hardware these days, it’s possible to use a generic platform with specialized software that enables the core functionality, whether for a network switch or a storage controller. Network, for example, were once specialized hardware appliances; today, they more and more are virtualized within the virtual with specialized software. Virtualization has revolutionized computing and allowed flexibility and speed of deployment. In the IT infrastructures of these days, virtualization enables both portability of entire virtual servers to off-premises data centers for disaster recovery and local virtual server replication for high availability. What used to require specialized hardware and complex cluster configuration can now be handled through a simple check box.

By applying the principles behind virtualization of compute to other areas such as storage, networking, firewalls and security, we can use its benefits throughout the data center. And it’s not just virtual servers: entire network configurations can be transported to distant public or private data centers to provide full architecture replication. Storage can be provisioned automatically in seconds and perfectly matched to the application that needs it. Firewalls are now part of the individual workload architecture, not of the entire data center, and this granularity against threats inside and out, yielding unprecedented security. But what does it all mean? Is the SDDC some high-tech fad or invention? If you ask me: absolutely not. The SDDC is the inevitable result of the evolution of the data center over the last decade.

I know there is a lot of marketing fluff around the datacenter, and Software Defined is one of them, but for me the SDDC is for a lot of companies the perfect fit for this time. What the future will bring, who knows where we stand in 10 years! The only thing we know is that a lot of companies are struggling with the IT infrastructure and need help in bringing the environment to the next level. SDDC is a big step forward for most (if not all) of us, and call it what you like but I’ll stick to SDDC

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