The Essentials for a Reliable SDDC

The value of cloud services lies in the rapid and cost-effective instantiation of applications that can be consumed as needed by users anywhere. With cloud services, enterprises can broadly deploy applications very quickly to meet their business needs while enjoying the benefits of simplified operations. Datacenters are at the heart of the cloud, where powerful compute and storage resources reside. For the business value of cloud services to be delivered, compute and network resources must be both dynamic and instantly available. This is not the case with today’s datacenters. Applications running on virtual machines that come up in minutes must wait hours or days for network services to be established. The datacenter network infrastructure is cumbersome to operate, requiring multiple levels of configuration within and across operational support and change-control systems. These static, configuration-driven processes compound the delays in turning up new applications and services, diminishing customer experience while dramatically increasing operational costs.

The ideal Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) network infrastructure must provide three key attributes in order to be viable:

• Automation and Customization: Network automation is the key to making datacenter networks self-service. Today, mobile devices can be connected instantly anywhere, any time and to any network. We need to have the same facility with virtual machines. If we can maintain the same mobile ID and have the same SLA consistently enforced anywhere, anytime, over any network, then virtual machines also should have the same IP address and move anywhere within or across datacenters, or over to a private cloud over the WAN, all under a common policy framework.
• Control and Performance: The potential of cloud is in the business agility it can offer. However, gains in business agility cannot come at the cost of losing control over users, applications, and sensitive data. It is imperative for CIOs and IT admins to have complete control and deterministic service behavior over their slice of compute and network regardless of the type of workload (virtual or physical) and regardless of the type of cloud (private or public). This guarantees that any user can only access and consume resources based on the permissions granted, and that any application that is deployed is in line with the security and compliance rules set by the CIO and the IT admin.
• Visibility: The key questions that CIOs and IT admins want answered are: How are my applications performing? How efficiently is my network running? What are the proactive and reactive operations, administration, and maintenance (OA&M) tools available to me at the application level, at the network level, and at the tenant level? What tools are available for show-back and charge-back, by tenant by application? How do I deploy, operate and manage my private and public cloud infrastructure as one? Rich OA&M tools at the application layer and the tenant layer, accompanied by analytics capabilities that allow for collection of data that measure the behavior of each application, are imperative for any solution to be complete.

The impact of SDDC on the IT team

Technologically, the delivery and offering of services/ products will be impacted. There is an increased need for specialized admins, hardware and software by the enterprises or IT departments which offer these SDDC services to the businesses and enterprises. IT will define what modern hardware, storage, compute power, security and the applications they require. They can group all of the required resources and components to create and offer the logical solution and application.

The enterprises, whose core business is not the IT can really reduce their IT staff and bring it to very minimum. Neither they need to directly rely and manage the specialized hardware and its continuous maintenance nor hire the consultants. While they can get many benefits like Policy based management, control over applications and governance, they can get the improved efficiencies from cloud, virtualization and many more evolving technology platforms, reduce their overall costs, power saving, cooling and non-core IT business management headaches. The other benefit which I could clearly see from IT professional’s perspective is that, they will have more clearly defined career path, focused training, the faster exposure to newly evolving technology and their adoption.

Elasticity in capacity

The biggest benefit of the SDDC architecture is the ability to provide IT as a service. This is envisioned to be implemented using self service portals, automated provisioning, etc. But this elasticity is completely dependent on the ability of the power and cooling infrastructure to scale along with the IT. The automatic provisioning thus needs to incorporate a check point of making sure that power and cooling is available for the expected provisioning. In legacy data center infrastructures where the information itself is not visible to IT (not being monitored OR being monitored only from a facility perspective). DCIM solutions aim to tackle this challenge by providing complete visibility of the resource utilization status to both the users (facility as well as IT). They can integrate with the virtual layer and provide the virtual layer with information regarding the availability of resources from the Power & Cooling infra side. The easiest approach of over provisioning Power and Cooling is no longer an option, and thus the above interactions between IT and Facility become very critical, going forward.

Overall, the idea of the SDDC is to provide true business agility and help enterprises deploy applications very rapidly, the network must provide abstraction and automation along with control and visibility for all applications of all tenants, and it must do this within and across data centers.