Best Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) Solutions

The four different types of data centers include:

1. Enterprise data centers: These data centers are usually used by an organization for internal purposes and are most commonly used by tech giants.
2. Colocation data centers: Colocation data centers are designed to be “rented,” where organizations can “rent” both the space and resources of a data center.
3. Managed service data centers: This type of data center serves customers directly, by offering computing and data storage services, but as a third party.
4. Cloud data centers: Cloud data centers are usually offered through third-party service providers.

The main difference between SDDC and cloud is that a cloud is private and only offers virtual machine self-service while using traditional provisioning and management. In contrast, SDDCs provide an organization with its own private cloud, which helps control hosted data better. With an SDDC, workloads are capable of operating independently of the physical IT infrastructure. While the cloud focuses more on the capabilities and services, software defined data centers focus on architecture and defining standard interfaces.

Although a software defined data center has many benefits, it also has some pitfalls. Here are some of the challenges associated with it:

• Workload mobility: While an SDCC promotes workload mobility, with workload mobility comes some challenges because as the workloads move from one location to a different one, it can create problems for the network that wouldn’t occur in a traditional data center.
• Energy efficiency: SDDCs require a very large amount of electricity. To solve this problem, however, there are solutions such as power management software, or optimizations for cooling and server utilization.
• Balancing resources: When you have a software defined data center, you are forced to find different ways to balance the resources that are allocated for applications against the resources allocated for essential services such as resiliency and recovery.
• High availability and integration: With SDDC, integration can be challenging. Even when building the SDDC, integration must be taken into consideration so that workloads can take advantage of it. It cannot be assumed that the SDDC will take integration and the high availability into account.
• Cloud environments that don’t match existing investments: Pursuing cloud environments that don’t match existing on-premise SDDC investments can create issues such as not being able to leverage existing tools and the IT skill sets needed to operate these new solutions. It also makes it harder to establish governance, operational policies, and security.
• Untrained IT teams: Another challenge of transitioning to an SDDC is that you often have to train employees to adjust to a new paradigm. Additionally, the change may require training for IT teams.

Software defined data centers include a long list of benefits. Below is a list of some of the major ones:

• Business agility: SDDCs increase business productivity and agility by consolidating duplicate functions. They also improve balance, flexibility, and adaptability, along with increasing ROI. SDDCs make it possible to deploy resources in minutes, rather than taking days or weeks to complete.
• Cost savings: Housing data in brick-and-mortar data centers can be expensive because it involves round-the-clock employees, more security, and you also have to cover the cost of operational needs, such as building leases and pricey hardware. By implementing a software defined data center, you can save money and time and can have IT team employees focus their efforts on other priorities.
• Increased scalability: Because SDDCs are cloud-based, they can easily scale with your business. This provides a big advantage over traditional data centers, which only scale when you make additional space for servers, purchase extra hardware and software, and have IT teams to help provide support.
• Improved infrastructure performance: Having an SDDC helps you improve infrastructure performance without having to make physical changes to it. It enables you to optimize storage, compute, and networking for individual applications and workloads.
• Streamlined operations: Because an SDDC controls resources by software, you can automate tasks including network provisioning, security responses, and storage tiering. By an SDDC streamlining your operations, you can reduce management costs and efforts, and also manage your infrastructure with fewer tools.
• Simplified data center management: An SDDC simplifies the management of data centers by using a single dashboard.
• Modernization: By implementing an SDDC solution, you help transition your company toward application modernization, ultimately enabling you to integrate with new and future technologies and giving you the ability to migrate workloads to the cloud.

Some of the main features to look out for when you are choosing a software defined data center include:

• Simplified data center management
• Reduced administrator burden
• Horizontal scaling
• Cost-efficient
• Automated orchestration
• Easier provisioning and monitoring of resources