VMworld 2013: Session STO5464 – Leading Edge: Evolving To A Software-Defined Data Center
A typical IT department spends an unsustainable 70% of its budget on maintenance, with little room for innovation. IT has reached a tipping point, but toward what? It's either obsolescence or the Software-Defined Data Center. The Software-Defined Data Center takes an architectural approach, driven by a set of innovative technologies. It starts with a basic, commoditized, hyper-standardized infrastructure. The key is an intense focus on automation of every possible operation, based on two big ideas. The first is a decoupled control plane for compute, network, and storage. The second is to implement and enforce all datacenter services via software-defined policy, where possible using software models for dataplane services. This approach requires that compute, storage, networking, security, and availability services are pooled, aggregated, and automated, everything managed by intelligent, policy-driven software. 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. This session will highlight and demonstrate the new disruptive technologies in the next generation data center—the VMware vCloud Suite driving policy and automation, the VMware NSX stack interacting with the Software-Defined Storage layer, flash and VM-granular policy, non-stop operations, advanced security and backups, all delivered in a service model. This session discusses real-world customer experiences on how they are evolving to the Software-Defined Data Center.