Innovation in Data Center - Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

Traditional data centers has antiquated, inefficient, less value for money and rigid infrastructure to handle the large amount of data and heavy applications in the fast changing world of IT. Deploying a new solution and application are still done manually in many organizations. Large emphasis on automation of existing processes, usage of flash memory, data protection and security concerns are creating a need for managing data center efficiently at lower operational costs in a more secured environment. Social Media, Big Data and Cloud Computing are transforming business and IT.

Hence there was a need of innovation in Data Center in which services are abstracted from hardware, automated, delivered on demand to support different types of applications in the data center which eventually lead to SDDC (Software-Defined Data Center).

A Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) is a data storage facility which is virtualized, integrated, automated and easier to manage and control. SDDC is an architecture that extends virtualization to all infrastructure elements (networking, storage, CPU and security), delivers them as a service and allows management of infrastructure elements centrally. The goal of software defined environment is to improve availability of data, automate processes, optimize application execution and support large volume of work.

Network Virtualization, Storage Virtualization and Server Virtualization are the underlying feature of SDDC which brings high degree of agility and flexibility to the infrastructure.

• Network Virtualization is accessing and managing resources in the network through installed software.  Network resources are dynamically allocated based on demand or administrative requirements in real time. Benefits of Network Virtualization: cost Savings, disaster recovery, scalability and dynamic control.
• Storage Virtualization is the separation of storage device’s functions from it physical elements and grouping them together so that it looks like a single storage device which can be managed from a central console. Benefits of Storage Virtualization: cost savings, better storage management and utilization, increased efficiency, better data availability and estimation of downtime.
• Server Virtualization is partitioning of the physical server into multiple virtual servers resources which can be access by multiple users as per their requirements. Using server virtualization, multiple operating systems can run on a single physical server as virtual machines, each with access to the underlying server's computing resources. Benefits of Server Virtualization: secured, low ownership and administration cost,  increased performance

Software Defined Data Center will definitely bring a change in the data centre technologies and infrastructure implementation. Virtualization of servers, storage, and networks will certainly reduce the dependency of hardware elements but it would be a mistake to think that the hardware elements won’t be of much importance in future. Nevertheless integration, deployment and automation of reliable, secured and efficient infrastructure has become easier due to this type of IT as a service (ITaaS) delivery.

About Author:

Nikhil Vaishnav is a consultant in Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. Within Systems Plus, he actively contributes to the areas of Technology and Information Security. He can be contacted at nikhil.v@spluspl.com