What is Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)?
Published on November 16, 2017,
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What is a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)?
The answer: according to Gartner, a software-defined data center (SDDC) is a data center in which all the infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service. The provisioning and operation of the entire infrastructure is automated by software.
Gartner further predicts that by 2020 SDDC will be considered a requirement for 75 percent of Global 2000 enterprises that seek to implement a DevOps approach and a hybrid cloud. In addition, Allied Market Research says that the SDDC market will be worth $139 billion by 2022. There seems to be significant attention given to SDDCs, but is this hype or are there tangible benefits?
The benefits of SDDC are indeed tangible and include:
- Users do not have to build their own infrastructure.
- Time savings – automation allows managers to monitor and maintain their systems from a central interface, which saves physical trips to the data center.
- Cost savings – both CapEx, in the form of pooled resources, and OpEx with regards to personnel time savings.
- Not limited to one vendor.
- Flexibility and Agility – the ability to make changes more quickly.
- Resilience – the ability to shift workloads around to avoid failures.
- Analytics – monitoring data is constantly being collected.
- Scalability – capacity available when needed.
As more organizations adopt SDDC, greater demands will be made of the underlying hardware and infrastructure, which will have to be visible, consistent and highly available. Due to these higher demands, both IT and Facilities personnel must have complete visibility into the entire infrastructure and eliminate those all-too-common data silos. However, to truly achieve complete visibility in a SDDC environment, DCIM software will be necessary.
A DCIM system will bring a deeper level of visibility into the IT and Facility sides while keeping all stakeholders informed by:
- Diagnosing and resolving issues quickly – decreasing the risk of outages.
- Promoting increased efficiencies.
- Allowing more informed decisions about power, space and cooling capacity, asset and workflow management
