Today at the San Diego VMUG Michael Ibarra, Office of the CTO (VMware), gave us a very quick brief on what is the Software Defined Datacenter. Here are a few highlights of his quick session:
- Software is taking over the world
- The shifting landscape: Delivery methods (cloud), devices (tablets), applications, work style (anywhere any time)
- CIOs are on a quest to make infrastructure to just work
- IT must compete for the company’s IT business (vice outsouring to public cloud providers)
- Specialized software is replacing specialized hardware in the datacenter
- Waves of change in IT: Mainframe, mini-computer, PC, networked/distributed computing, virtual/cloud computing
- Apps Drive Platforms
- Current datacenters are a conglomeration of past IT decisions (mainframe, Unix, RISC, etc.)
- The price for computing power continues to drop at a rapid rate
- Abilitity now to virtualize almost all applications
- Ability to virtualize almost all hardware components (networking and storage)
- Today it can take 5 days to approve and configure a VM, but in the future the software defined datacenter could get that down to three minutes
- Future: Pools of compute, memory, storage, networking.
- Abstract, pool, automate
- SDDC is taking pool of resources and divvying them up appropriately, even though they share common hardware
- Multiple virtual datacenters each with its own workloads and requirements on the same hardware (e.g. Finance, R&D)
- Key: This has to apply to any and all applications (not just a few or most). Must work across the board (tier-1, SAP, Exchange, SQL, etc.)
- Check out the vCloud Suite Editions
- What about end user computing (EUC)? It’s not just about VDI these days.
