Smoothing the rocky road to the software-defined data centre

The software-defined data centre (SDDC), like cloud computing before it, is one of those nebulous IT industry buzzwords that has the potential to engulf IT departments in confusion and complexity. Since VMware coined the phrase in 2012, vendors of virtualisation, storage, networking and servers have been scrambling to position their offerings under the ‘software defined’ banner, leading some observers to dismiss the term as yet another piece of misleading marketing-speak. There’s more than a hint of irony in this, since SDDC is really all about making the management of large-scale IT resources simpler through automation.

What is SDDC?
Essentially, SDDC refers to a data centre with a fully virtualised infrastructure, where IT resources are provided ‘as a service’ and can be deployed, configured, operated and fully automated by software. The reason it’s being hailed as the next big thing is that once true SDDC is in place, it can take cloud computing to the next level, finally enabling the long-touted dream of true utility computing – where IT resources can be provisioned on the fly and workloads easily moved to wherever they can be run most productively and cost-effectively.

In an SDDC, IT resources can be spun up and scaled out in an instant without the need for manual configuration and optimisation of all the underlying equipment and processes. This automated environment should give organisations unprecedented levels of efficiency, flexibility, agility and security, allowing them to deliver applications faster and at lower cost than ever before. The trouble with simplicity, though, is that getting there can be a long and rocky road.

The three key components of SDDC are software-based (i.e. virtualised) servers, storage and networking. Most organisations are already some way along the road to virtualising their infrastructure and offering compute resources to their organisation as a service, but today only the largest hyper-scale IT users such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook are in the process of putting in place all the elements necessary for true SDDCs. It could be several more years before SDDC is the norm for most organisations.

Obstacles on the path
The reason for the reticence is that businesses still face considerable challenges when it comes to successfully implementing all the underlying software-defined components, particularly software-defined networking (SDN). For starters, the technology is still at a very low level of maturity. Standards are essential if organisations are to achieve true flexibility and portability of workloads, yet at the moment vendors are pushing their products in different directions in a bid to define the future of the market. Customers are rightly wary of the potential for proprietary lock-in.

While there are some efforts towards open standards – such as the open-source cloud platform OpenStack and open SDN initiatives like OpenFlow and OpenDaylight – as yet none have been widely adopted or are readily available, and few organisations want to place their bets on a technology that may end up as a dud.

The second major challenge is legacy infrastructure. Organisations spend a lot of money on networking solutions, and they need to make the most of those investments. It’s simply not feasible to rip and replace everything in one go, so the shift to SDDC is likely to be a gradual one. That means SDDCs must have the ability to identify and integrate with legacy infrastructure.

The third key challenge is around security and compliance. An environment where network configurations are continually and automatically being changed by software is the stuff of nightmares for many IT security managers. The only way of ensuring their organisational security and compliance policies are being adhered to amid this endless stream of on-the-fly changes is to ensure the management of those policies is similarly automated and fully integrated into the change process (what we call “baked-in” security).

Faced with these obstacles, many organisations are choosing to sit tight. They understand there are potentially huge benefits in making the change, but equally they want to minimise any potential risks. But while the route to true SDDC may be long and uncertain, doing nothing could be a riskier strategy than working your way round the obstacles and making steady progress down the path.

The answer? Start automating now
So where does that leave an organisation that wants to gain the agility to move at the speed business requires, but equally doesn’t want to head down a path that could lead to a technological dead end? The answer is to start automating your security and network change processes, and integrating your legacy infrastructure, now. That means you’ll be ready to adopt and integrate standard SDDC components gradually as the market settles down – and hit the ground running when the time is right.

Fortunately, this process of automating changes to application, security and network configurations has been vastly simplified by the appearance on the market of advanced policy orchestration software products. Essentially, these allow an organisation to define their access, security and network policies at a high level and then have them implemented automatically as business changes are requested, vastly speeding up the process and eliminating the errors that can occur when trying to make changes manually. The best solutions will provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow you to integrate multiple legacy, virtual and cloud networks as well as paving the way for future integration of SDN solutions.

You need to take time to define your policies on such systems and integrate your various networks, but once done you will have unprecedented central control and oversight of your policies along with the ability to orchestrate application, security and network changes across different business units simply and automatically.
Implementing such software now has compelling benefits. Not only will it ease your eventual transition to an SDDC environment, ensuring you have the right policies and automated change management process in place (and working with your existing infrastructure components), but it also brings compelling benefits in its own right. Policy orchestration software will increase your business agility, improve your security and compliance and give you a measurable return on investment in the short term, irrespective of how the SDDC landscape shapes up. And that will propel your organisation to stride ever more confidently into the software-defined future.