Software Defined Datacenter

Datacenter 4

The Software-Defined Data Center is a unified data center platform that provides unprecedented automation, flexibility, and efficiency to transform the way you deliver IT. Compute, storage, networking, security, and availability services are pooled, aggregated, and delivered as software, and managed by intelligent, policy-driven software. Self-service, policy-based provisioning, automated infrastructure, and application and business management complete the picture. The result is a data center optimized for the cloud era, providing unmatched business agility, the highest SLAs for all applications, dramatically simpler operations, and lower costs.

A Natural Process of Data Center Evolution

Over the years, data centers have become largely fragmented environments, with numerous types of proprietary software siloed inside specialized hardware components. Server virtualization was the first step in simplifying this inherently complex and rigid infrastructure.

While many data center operations remain constrained by dependencies between software and specialized hardware, IT continues to progress toward greater simplicity and flexibility. Three trends are driving the evolution:

The shrinking cost of raw computing power. Today’s industry-standard x86-based servers offer performance on par with traditional proprietary platforms, at a fraction of the cost. Networking and storage can now also be provisioned on affordable general-purpose hardware instead of costly, proprietary, monolithic machines.

Virtualization for all applications. Thanks to the tremendous capabilities of today’s virtualization platforms, just about all applications can and are being virtualized. This extends the benefits of cheaper compute power, by enabling its utilization with vastly greater efficiency and agility than ever before. Not only are business-critical applications like Oracle and Exchange being virtualized; enterprises are increasingly doing the same for Big Data-oriented applications as well.

Virtualization of hardware appliances. Historically, capabilities such as firewall, load-balancing, WAN acceleration, backup, and deduping have been delivered by physical appliances. Today, ecosystem vendors are building more and more software-defined alternatives that plug into the Software-Defined Data Center.

The cumulative effect is a clear convergence toward a fully software-defined environment—a far more effective, resilient and cost-efficient approach to delivering and managing infrastructure.

The Software-Defined Data Center: Operating Principles

Rather than mask the inherent rigidity of specialized hardware under a tangle of scripts, the Software-Defined Data center leapfrogs these constraints to change the way all data center services are delivered.

As implemented in VMware’s vCloud Suite, the virtualization principles of abstraction, pooling and automation are applied to compute, storage, networking, security, and availability. This creates the Virtual Data Center, a new construct that aggregates these software-defined services and enables intelligent, policy-based provisioning, automation, and monitoring. APIs and other connectors provide seamless extensibility to third-party platforms and public cloud services.

Taken together, these capabilities comprise VMware Cloud Infrastructure, the virtualized infrastructure at the heart of the Software-Defined Data Center. As highly capable as it is, this “engine” is not sufficient on its own. It must be fully managed, which encompasses everything from delivering access to the right services with the right approvals to ensuring the performance, compliance and efficiency of your private cloud.

These management capabilities—delivered via VMware Cloud Management—are specifically designed to provide deep insight into cloud infrastructure performance, while enabling services to be provisioned and accessed in any available cloud.

For many companies, the Software-Defined Data Center will coexist in a heterogeneous environment with multiple hypervisors, hardware from different vendors, and various public cloud services. You can abstract away this complexity by extending VMware Cloud Management beyond your vSphere-enabled Software-Defined Data Center—to impose uniform governance, control, access and self-service over your entire heterogeneous, hybrid cloud environment.

For additional information

Adorian Technologies is a registered VMware Professional Solutions Provider. All VMware cloud and virtualization services can be purchased through Adorian Technologies. Please contact us today to discuss your network needs and VMware licenses requirements- sales@adoriantechnolgies.com