What is a Software Defined Data Center?

Infrastructure in a traditional datacenter is typically defined by hardware and devices. It comprises of thousands of different applications, running in a mixed hardware environment using multiple management tools. One of its key characteristics is frequent application patching and updation to handle complex workloads based on multiple architectures. The flip side, however, includes multiple issues like underutilization of resources. These further have a rippling effect across multiple investment and effort expended areas including energy consumption, management costs, software licenses and data center outlays.

VMware introduced the concept of Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) at the VM World conference in San Francisco and Barcelona in the year 2012. Its objective was to overcome the inefficiencies of traditional data centers and to deliver greater value to business. According to VMware, SDDC is "A data center platform that can be dynamically configured to meet the needs of any and all application workloads, all operating at peak levels of efficiency and automation".

Software Defined Data Center aims to abstract intelligent software from standard hardware by separating the control plane (configuration, topology awareness, management, operations) from the data plane (movement and storage of data). In this type of data center, the virtualized compute, network and storage layers along with their application and management components ideally exist only as software. The application layer is completely independent of the hardware layer in an SDDC.

The core components of an SDDC are network virtualization, server virtualization and storage virtualization. It also has a business logic layer to translate application requirements, SLAs, policies and cost considerations. In this kind of data center all elements of the infrastructure — networking, storage, CPU and security – will be virtualized and delivered as a service. The provisioning and operation of the entire infrastructure is driven by software.