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April - 2013 issue

The Future of Software Defined Data Centers: A Glimpse

By Brian Donaghy, CEO, Appcore

The technology industry continues to evolve with the introduction of software-defined data centers. Until recently, such advances were not possible because the computing , storage and virtualization necessary to support them were not available. Moving forward, we will continue to see automation and software-defined data centers become independent from infrastructure and facilitate more effective business practices.

What is a Software-Defined Data Center?

A software-defined data center is just that: a data center with infrastructure defined in software. It removes the hardware and software layers from one another, simplifying techniques and producing significant cost savings, efficiency and more raw computing power.
In order to be considered a software-defined data center, it must have:
• An access management tier with self-service and programmable interfaces, and subscriber, identity and access management.
• A service management tier with a service catalog, model, configuration, availability and performance, demand, financial and
service-level management.
• A resource management tier with resource state management, performance monitoring and usage metering, security and governor/
configuration management.
• A resource tier with component managers, resource pools, virtual resources and physical resources.

Benefits of using a Software-Defined Data Center

Utilizing these resources will allow users to access the data center, or even multiple data centers, regardless of geographical location,
and abstracted from the confines of the physical hardware. By using these configurations, businesses can modernize infrastructure without the associated revamp costs.

Software-defined data centers allow organizations to have their own private cloud environment and exercise more control over their
hosted data. They also enjoy ondemand access instead of requesting permission from the cloud provider and the ability to implement the level
of security rather than relying on the
security put in place by the provider.

How Software and Automation will become Independent from Infrastructure

In a way, software and automation have already become independent from the infrastructure in which they are hosted. We have seen this
in the Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service models. Moving forward, we will see this trend continue to gain traction as the
following components become more developed:
• Abstraction – enables the decoupling of a resource from its consumer.