It was a fine summer morning of May 2006, when I was requested to drive down into the deep forests of New York state. It was also advised that do not use GPS as coordinates will not work if tried entering the address of this Tier IV world class Disaster Recovery Center hosting Fortune 500 data in its SAN Storages and Tape Libraries.

Well I reached the site on time as we all would do when we get our first job right after completing our Undergrad. Soon after I find my self walking in to a big hall with lots of noise and with low temperature. Environment was cleaned and dust free as I have never witnessed before. This was a Server Farm that I can't explain in words. In school we heard terms Servers, Servers rooms and data centers, but not Server Farm. There were more than 1000 physical servers, along with 20 cisco 6500 category switches along with AS400 and how can I forget beautiful z9 mainframes.

After that very moment my career was set to roll into Infrastructure design and support. For any organization small or large an infrastructure that hosts its applications, databases, ERP, Lync and Exchange are the vital pieces for growth in the competitive world. 

The modern data center is a complex environment with many different systems and many different objectives. Systems like Power Management, Space Cooling, UPS, Standby power generators and obviously IT Infrastructure. The data center exists to provide an organization with the networking, storage, processing and connectivity features needed to operate in the fast paced, data-driven world we live in today.

Systems and applications were continuously added to the data center to the point where many data centers were completely full with no room for add new hardware to support growing needs for processing, storage and network capabilities.
When I I joined a Telecom Giant in a developing country of Pakistan, I was invited to visit their newly build Tier III Data Center in the heart of Islamabad, Pakistan. It was truly amazing seeing such a technology being build in a country which I returned after more than a decade. I was informed that we shall be migrating all services to this new state of the art Data Center.  

In the last 8 years, I have at least performed 5 Data Center migration projects, 1 Server Consolidation Project, and 1 SAN Storage Consolidation project and last but not least an on going x86 Server Virtualization Project. Today many organizations have been undergoing data center consolidation/migration projects in recent years. These consolidation projects have resulted in data centers being closed down and services and platforms being moved into other data centers within the organization. As expected, these projects have added to already overburdened data centers but virtualization has again provided real value to the business and the data center by allowing many physical servers to be combined into a virtualized environment.

The use of virtualized environments has led many organizations to look for other ways to use virtualization within their data centers. That search has led many companies to research and implement Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) as a way to replace or augment their existing data center infrastructure. 

Organizations can remove underutilized servers, replace aging networking and storage systems and improve / increase security. Having the ability to define the entire data center infrastructure allows companies to move their data center systems and technologies at the speed of business. When new services are required by the business, the IT group can quickly make the necessary changes within the data center to provide that new service or offering.

Another benefit of SDDC is that it allows companies to spend less on hardware for the data center. Of course, hardware will still be needed for SDDC but the hardware won’t be the infrastructure itself. Hardware will simply be the delivery system for the software defined data center. With SDDC, hardware is simply a commodity that can be swapped in and out as needed. Using commodity hardware for all aspects of the data center allows companies to save a great deal of money within the data center.

Data Center agility doesn’t necessarily mean new systems nor does it mean moving your data center to the cloud. It does mean thinking about your data center and your data center capabilities in new ways and then putting in new processes and systems to make the data center flexible.

 

Today SDDC isn’t the answer to every data center problem, but it is an approach that can be used to bring agility to the data center.