The software-defined data center was all the rage at VMworld 2013, when NSX, VMware’s network virtualization platform, was announced. At VMworld 2014, the honeymoon of the NSX hype had worn off some, yet network virtualization is still a key growing and maturing technology. Nevertheless, it is still too immature for an all-out adoption at this …
Continue reading “The Software-Defined Data Center with Nuage”
Come on, let’s get real here. The software-defined data center may become the norm in two years in the gilded cages of Silicon Valley, North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and the other “centers of excellence” out there. But in the real world—you know, the one where companies are still using NT4 servers to deliver real and …
My response to Stephen Foskett’s tweet of a post about the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Symposium led to an interesting conversation about the nature of the SDDC—what it is, what it is not, and why we should care. The software-defined data center is considered by some to be an instrument of vendor lock-in, vaporware, or …
Over the last few weeks I have been struggling with automating deployment and testing of virtual desktops for my own edification. This struggle has pointed out automation weaknesses which need to be addressed for automation and the software defined data center to succeed and not only be deployed from software but also self-healing and all the great things we associate with SDDC, SDN, etc. But current automation has some serious flaws and weaknesses. In essence, in order to automate something you must have a well known exact image from which to work.
The future of OpenStack looks bright, and with the all the software-defined data center (SDDC) features contained in the recent release of “Grizzly” they are now ready to compete toe-to-toe with heavyweights like VMware, Nutanix, Dell, and HP. Whether they can start unseating VMware products in the enterprise remains to be seen, though. Despite the immediate SDDC advantage of OpenStack, companies and technologies like that of Nicira and Virsto, both acquired by VMware, are not to be ignored.
One aspect of SDDC that does not get a lot of attention is Data Protection, instead we are concentrating on SDN and automation. Yet, this leads me to Data Protection. There is a clear marriage between Data Protection and SDDC that needs to be added to any architecture. As with all things, we start with the architecture. Our SDDC architecture should also include data protection, but what data are we really protecting? Within SDDC there are three forms of data: tenant, configuration, and automation. Without one or the other, we may not be able to reload our SDDC during a disaster. What is required to get these three types of data, what really are these types of data? and how can we add data protection into SDDC cleanly?
