SDDC: The Future-Perfect Way to Compute, Store, and Network

There is a remarkable shift in an organization’s expectations from its IT department. Today, IT is seen more as a solution to business problems rather than as an investment to increase productivity and efficiency. To deliver on these business demands, IT departments are increasingly considering new technology trends, like SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud). Pressure is coming onto enterprise IT from all sides— developers, end users, line of business owners—to eliminate complexity by quickly delivering the right IT services and applications to support the business. And to bring agility and efficiency in IT, cloud is becoming more prevalent these days.

According to EMC India SMAC findings, organizations are increasingly moving to the cloud, with 76% now agreeing that combining public and private cloud can improve security and agility. However, the challenge for enterprise IT is that it can be difficult to bring together the performance, security, compliance, and control of private cloud with the flexibility of public cloud while maintaining interoperability and visibility.

In search of an agile infrastructure, as IT organizations move rapidly towards hybrid cloud environments, the conversations around Software Defined datacenter (SDDC), have crystallized into something more meaningful.

In a typical enterprise scenario, Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) refers to a datacenter, wherein all the IT infrastructure components of networking, storage, computing, and security are virtualized and also delivered as a service. In an SDDC scenario, the deployment, provisioning, configuration, and operation of the entire IT infrastructure moves away from the traditional hardwareoriented approach and is implemented through softwaredriven approach. This is also a key to deliver high level of IT agility, better control, and manageability in the hands of CIOs.

Three major building blocks of SDDC are network virtualization, storage virtualization, and server virtualization. According to an IDC report commissioned by VMware titled ‘Empowering Organizations in a Software Defined World,’ an estimated $4 bn is expected to be avoided between 2014 and 2020 with a software defined approach to manage IT in India. Clearly, though at nascent stage, Indian enterprises are realizing the benefits of SDDC within the Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Software Defined Storage (SDS) markets and its potential to realign the capabilities of the internal IT department with the elastic and agile demands of businesses.

Key Benefits

Streamlining the datacenter: SDDC provides tremendous benefits for all enterprises that struggle with datacenter management, especially those with limited IT resources and will be the foundation of next-generation of cloud computing and cloud-based services. Most importantly, it dramatically simplifies processes and increases the speed of appropriating and provisioning networking, server and storage resources, enabling an organization to become more flexible, agile and responsive to customers. With automated policy-based provisioning, application deployment can occur in minutes or even seconds.

 Automating the datacenter: SDDC conserves hardware and staff resources and is a very cost-effective method. This allows staff to focus on business-critical technology innovation instead of routine management tasks and the infrastructure to be used more efficiently.

Improved security: Trust is of utmost importance for mobile, cloud, big data, and social environments and it is set to drive next-generation datacenter technology ahead. Compliance with security policies and mandates is ensured with the help of unified monitoring of datacenters as it provides a holistic outlook of data resources and eliminates fragmented monitoring.

SDDC intends to move an organization from a workload-defined structure to a software-defined architecture where rigorous workloads can be identified and managed dynamically with the help of software-based services. What organizations need to focus on is how these technologies can deliver greater business value. Simply being able to virtualize some servers has a limited value, but when combined with a highly automated infrastructure, IT departments can deliver a degree of IT agility that the businesses have been demanding. When the storage and networking overlay is added, storage systems become far more efficient than ever before, networks become more dynamic and scalable, and overall IT starts to deliver some genuine business value.

The author is Director Technology Solutions - India and Saarc, EMC