IT vendors are always creating new jargon, and now the target seems to be data centres. Which is why, while most vendors are developing software that can help manage the data centre and power cooling efficiently, the industry resounds with the latest jargon, SDDC, short for Software-Defined Data Centre. It is all about driving agility, performance, simplified architecture and an efficient orchestration of various components.
SDDC is the phrase used to refer to a data centre where all infrastructure is virtualised and delivered as a service. The control of the data centre is fully automated by software, meaning the hardware configuration is maintained through intelligent software systems. This is in contrast to traditional data centres where hardware and devices typically define the infrastructure.
Most often, technical architects are asked, What is SDN anyways? While the work for SDN began at Stanford and the term caught on and created the entire SDN revolution, no one is clear as to what the term really means.
VMwares chief technology architect says, "Now it is just being used as a general term for networking; it is now just an umbrella term for cool stuff in networking."
Next Step in Virtualisation
SDDC is considered to be the next step in the evolution of virtualisation and cloud computing, as it provides a solution to support both legacy enterprise applications and new cloud computing services.
The trend appears to be that all IT hardware is now being defined by software and everything is virtualised. While networking and storage is joining this league, the new term SDDC is emerging to denote the convergence of all these things into something much bigger. It is said that the former CTO of VMware, Dr. Steve Herrod, coined SDDC. And he was talking about the convergence of networking, storage and server virtualisation, and how it would affect engineers and architects and change their vision of the data centre.
DC Challenges
Dave Cappuccio, Member of the Gartner Blog, says that the industry just loves new catch phrases--and when a new one catches on, the vendors and press can get amazingly creative in assigning that phrase roles and responsibilities that go far beyond its original concept. However, he says, spin forward to today, and the buzz word du jour is Software Defined X. Leading the pack is Software Defined Networks and Software Defined Storage, which intuitively make sense, but lately the variation game has begun and Ive heard about Software Defined Organisations, Software Defined Staffing, Software Defined Power, and Software Defined Radio Receivers (really). The interesting one to come out of the pack, according to Cappucccio, though, is Software Defined Data Centres. While originally he was skeptical about any SDx assignation, he thinks the concept of SDDC resonates well. He says that this obviously is mostly conceptual right now, but it is the way the industry is heading, and astute IT managers today are thinking not necessarily about the bells and whistles vendors promise,-- but about the organisational impact these environments are going to cause.
VMware believes that the current network architectures are rigid, complex and create a costly barrier to realising the full agility organisations expect from Private Cloud. Limitations of physical networks tie an increasingly pooled dynamic virtual world back to inflexible, dedicated hardware, creating artificial barriers to optimising network architecture and capacity utilisation.
While a virtual machine can be provisioned in a matter of minutes, surrounding that VM with all the necessary network and security services still takes days. This is because the current network and security operations remain dependent on manual provisioning of VLANS and dedicated physical appliances with fragmented management interfaces.
As a result, current network and security architectures not only reduce efficiency, but also limit the ability of enterprises to rapidly deploy, move, scale and protect applications and data based on business needs.
While the benefits of SDDC are well articulated, and the idea might sound good, many were dismissive of the term because VMware started using SDDC as a marketing tool for its own products, including vCloud Director and its various components.
Solving the DC Complexity with SDDC
VMware as a company is pursuing its broad vision of the Software Defined Data Centre. It's a vision that is about untethering workload mobility from hardware infrastructure.
VMwares technology architect says that the Software Defined Data Centre is not necessarily about replacing humans with some form of autonomic intelligence.
"The goal is, how you make networking have the properties of software systems as far as innovation, provisioning speed, and upgrade speed?" he says. "You want networks to be as flexible and as agile as compute is. That's not the case today, but that's where we're going."
But the SDDC concept works well. The vendor has been helping customers convert servers into software compute and extend the principles to other components of the data center. With this process, it gets easy to virtualise the components of the data centre.
VMware is offering a full suite of systems--vSPhere, vCloud, VFabric, vCenter--all designed to provide a coordinated, integrated approach to software-based everything. Since it already owns much of the virtual server action within most data centres, it is in a position to simplify infrastructure, not merely camouflage its complexities the way OS does for the PC. We are formulating the vision into reality and about 50 to 60 per cent of the enterprise data centres will be under the spell of SDDC, says B S Nagarajan, Director - Systems Engineering, India & SAARC at VMware.
We are trying to solve the data centre challenges in an unconventional manner, adds Nagarajan.
As IT organisations move to a converged infrastructure and service-oriented model, many find that current data centre networking architectures are a limiting factor. VLAN-based switching models have a long history, but suffer from the following challenges in the data centre:
- Inflexibility: VLAN and switching boundaries are not flexible nor are easily extensible. As requirements grow or shrink, compute and storage resources need to be allocated without major operational overhead.
- Operationally Inefficient Fault Tolerance: High-availability technologies such as VMware Fault Tolerance work best with flat Layer 2 networks, but creating and managing this architecture can be operationally difficult, especially at scale.
- VLAN and IP Address Management Limitations: IP address maintenance and VLAN limits become challenges as the data centre scales, particularly when strong isolation is required or in service provider environments.
VMware and Cisco Systems have created the VXLAN technology. VXLAN is a method for floating virtual domains on top of a common networking and virtualisation infrastructure. By leveraging industry-standard Ethernet technology, large numbers of virtual domains can be created above an existing network, with complete isolation from each other and the underlying network.
Benefits to Data Centres
- Flexibility: Datacentre server and storage utilisation and flexibility is maximised through the support of stretched clusters that cross switching and pod boundaries
- Streamlined Network Operations: VXLAN runs on standard Layer 3 IP networks, eliminating the need to build and manage a large Layer 2 underlying transport layer.
- Investment Protection: VXLAN runs over standard switching hardware, with no need for software upgrades or special code versions on the switches.
By B S Nagarajan, Director - Systems Engineering, India & SAARC at VMware
Genesis of SDDC
IT vendors are always creating new jargon, and now the target seems to be data centres. Which is why, while most vendors are developing software that can help manage the data centre and power cooling efficiently, the industry resounds with the latest jargon, SDDC, short for Software-Defined Data Centre. It is all about driving agility, performance, simplified architecture and an efficient orchestration of various components.
SDDC is the phrase used to refer to a data centre where all infrastructure is virtualised and delivered as a service. The control of the data centre is fully automated by software, meaning the hardware configuration is maintained through intelligent software systems. This is in contrast to traditional data centres where hardware and devices typically define the infrastructure.
Most often, technical architects are asked, What is SDN anyways? While the work for SDN began at Stanford and the term caught on and created the entire SDN revolution, no one is clear as to what the term really means.
VMwares chief technology architect says, "Now it is just being used as a general term for networking; it is now just an umbrella term for cool stuff in networking."
Next Step in Virtualisation
SDDC is considered to be the next step in the evolution of virtualisation and cloud computing, as it provides a solution to support both legacy enterprise applications and new cloud computing services.
The trend appears to be that all IT hardware is now being defined by software and everything is virtualised. While networking and storage is joining this league, the new term SDDC is emerging to denote the convergence of all these things into something much bigger. It is said that the former CTO of VMware, Dr. Steve Herrod, coined SDDC. And he was talking about the convergence of networking, storage and server virtualisation, and how it would affect engineers and architects and change their vision of the data centre.
DC Challenges
Dave Cappuccio, Member of the Gartner Blog, says that the industry just loves new catch phrases--and when a new one catches on, the vendors and press can get amazingly creative in assigning that phrase roles and responsibilities that go far beyond its original concept. However, he says, spin forward to today, and the buzz word du jour is Software Defined X. Leading the pack is Software Defined Networks and Software Defined Storage, which intuitively make sense, but lately the variation game has begun and Ive heard about Software Defined Organisations, Software Defined Staffing, Software Defined Power, and Software Defined Radio Receivers (really). The interesting one to come out of the pack, according to Cappucccio, though, is Software Defined Data Centres. While originally he was skeptical about any SDx assignation, he thinks the concept of SDDC resonates well. He says that this obviously is mostly conceptual right now, but it is the way the industry is heading, and astute IT managers today are thinking not necessarily about the bells and whistles vendors promise,-- but about the organisational impact these environments are going to cause.
VMware believes that the current network architectures are rigid, complex and create a costly barrier to realising the full agility organisations expect from Private Cloud. Limitations of physical networks tie an increasingly pooled dynamic virtual world back to inflexible, dedicated hardware, creating artificial barriers to optimising network architecture and capacity utilisation.
While a virtual machine can be provisioned in a matter of minutes, surrounding that VM with all the necessary network and security services still takes days. This is because the current network and security operations remain dependent on manual provisioning of VLANS and dedicated physical appliances with fragmented management interfaces.
As a result, current network and security architectures not only reduce efficiency, but also limit the ability of enterprises to rapidly deploy, move, scale and protect applications and data based on business needs.
While the benefits of SDDC are well articulated, and the idea might sound good, many were dismissive of the term because VMware started using SDDC as a marketing tool for its own products, including vCloud Director and its various components.
Solving the DC Complexity with SDDC
VMware as a company is pursuing its broad vision of the Software Defined Data Centre. It's a vision that is about untethering workload mobility from hardware infrastructure.
VMwares technology architect says that the Software Defined Data Centre is not necessarily about replacing humans with some form of autonomic intelligence.
"The goal is, how you make networking have the properties of software systems as far as innovation, provisioning speed, and upgrade speed?" he says. "You want networks to be as flexible and as agile as compute is. That's not the case today, but that's where we're going."
But the SDDC concept works well. The vendor has been helping customers convert servers into software compute and extend the principles to other components of the data center. With this process, it gets easy to virtualise the components of the data centre.
VMware is offering a full suite of systems--vSPhere, vCloud, VFabric, vCenter--all designed to provide a coordinated, integrated approach to software-based everything. Since it already owns much of the virtual server action within most data centres, it is in a position to simplify infrastructure, not merely camouflage its complexities the way OS does for the PC. We are formulating the vision into reality and about 50 to 60 per cent of the enterprise data centres will be under the spell of SDDC, says B S Nagarajan, Director - Systems Engineering, India & SAARC at VMware.
We are trying to solve the data centre challenges in an unconventional manner, adds Nagarajan.
As IT organisations move to a converged infrastructure and service-oriented model, many find that current data centre networking architectures are a limiting factor. VLAN-based switching models have a long history, but suffer from the following challenges in the data centre:
- Inflexibility: VLAN and switching boundaries are not flexible nor are easily extensible. As requirements grow or shrink, compute and storage resources need to be allocated without major operational overhead.
- Operationally Inefficient Fault Tolerance: High-availability technologies such as VMware Fault Tolerance work best with flat Layer 2 networks, but creating and managing this architecture can be operationally difficult, especially at scale.
- VLAN and IP Address Management Limitations: IP address maintenance and VLAN limits become challenges as the data centre scales, particularly when strong isolation is required or in service provider environments.
VMware and Cisco Systems have created the VXLAN technology. VXLAN is a method for floating virtual domains on top of a common networking and virtualisation infrastructure. By leveraging industry-standard Ethernet technology, large numbers of virtual domains can be created above an existing network, with complete isolation from each other and the underlying network.
Benefits to Data Centres
- Flexibility: Datacentre server and storage utilisation and flexibility is maximised through the support of stretched clusters that cross switching and pod boundaries
- Streamlined Network Operations: VXLAN runs on standard Layer 3 IP networks, eliminating the need to build and manage a large Layer 2 underlying transport layer.
- Investment Protection: VXLAN runs over standard switching hardware, with no need for software upgrades or special code versions on the switches.
By B S Nagarajan, Director - Systems Engineering, India & SAARC at VMware
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