The Journey Toward the Software-Defined Data Center - Cognizant

The Vendor SpaceGiven SDDC’s status as a potential future state,leading vendors are working to ensure theirproducts remain relevant and in concert with thisfast-evolving marketplace. As a result, mergersand acquisitions is one route for vendors to eithercomplement or add value to existing productsand services. Some recent M&As include:• VMware’s acquisition of Nicira gives VMwarethe capability for network virtualization via anengine that decouples the physical networkfrom the virtual network. The physical networkstill has the properties to route packets andalign to routing protocols whereas the virtualnetwork maintains policies and accesses listsand services.• Cisco’s acquisition of Cloupia moves Ciscotoward a unified and converged infrastructureand management platform.• Oracle’s acquisition of Xsigo enhanced Oracle’scapabilities for network virtualization and software-definednetworking stacks.• Brocade’s acquisition of Vyatta extends itsreach into SDN, providing the ability to deliversoftware-based network OS with firewall,routing and VPN capabilities for cloud servicesdelivery.• EMC’s acquisition of Syncplicity and developmentof ViPR for software-defined storage forstorage virtualization and self-service provisioning;ViPR’s controller can support broadand varying storage technologies for integrationwith APIs for onboarding disparate storagesystems.Looking ForwardSDDCs have the potential to help enterprisesradically shift the way infrastructure has beenarchitected, deployed and managed. As discussedabove, the proposition for enterprises is to movefrom a workload-defined architecture consideringvolumetric and growth while sizing and architectinginfrastructure, to a software-defined infrastructurearchitecture wherein dynamic workloadscan be defined, provisioned and managed.The challenges discussed in this paper are critical,and OEMs and vendors will need to address thisholistically rather than only look at discrete virtualizedresources to maximize adoption of thefuture goal of building an SDDC.If and when this paradigm shift to SDDCs is fullyembraced and propelled to the mainstream, it willrevolutionize the service marketplace, as OEMpartners, system integrators, data center providers,managed service partners and implementerswill reorient their efforts toward subscription-basedenterprise services. We believe thatthere will be a plethora of tools and acceleratorsenabling this vision.It now remains to be seen how the industrymoves forward with SDDC thinking and developsproducts designed to maximize its adoption.There are a few early movers thus far, such asVMware and Cisco. However, with mergers andacquisitions, the large players referenced abovecan quickly enter the race to help realize thisfuture vision.AppendixForrester’s definition of an SDDC: “An SDDC isan integrated abstraction layer that defines acomplete data center by means of a layer ofsoftware that presents the resources of the datacenter as pools of virtual and physical resources,and allows them to be composed into arbitraryuser-defined services.”IDC defines SDDC as “a loosely coupled set ofsoftware components that seek to virtualize andfederate data center-wide hardware resourcessuch as storage, compute and network resourcesand eventually virtualize facilities-centricresources as well. The goal for a software-defineddata center is to tie together these various disparateresources in the data center and make thedata center available in the form of an integratedservice…”References• http://www.forrester.com/The+SoftwareDefined+Data+Center+Is+The+Future+Of+Infrastructure+Architecture/fulltext/-/E-RES81941.• http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/software-defined-data-center-analytics-21481/.• http://www.tintri.com.• http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2013/04/10/why-software-defined-data-centers-cost-muchmore-without-optimized-power-and-cooling/.cognizant 20-20 insights 10