25 May
Organizations explore new data center architectures to increase IT agility. Today’s competitive environment forces companies to minimize complexity, reduce costs and accelerate service delivery while increasing control over IT.
Procurement and distribution processes in traditional IT infrastructures are rather cumbersome. Business users and developers working with these infrastructures must wait weeks, even months, to purchase and provision physical infrastructure components. However, in today’s changing market conditions, teams are racing against time to meet customer expectations, and in some cases, they need IT resources ready within minutes.
The software-defined data center (SDDC) is a cloud-based architecture that dramatically improves IT agility. SDDC pools infrastructure resources, standardizes management tools across tiers, and provides policy-based provisioning, enabling IT groups to respond more quickly to new resource demands. SDDC solutions also enable IT teams to have a say in procurement, reduce costs and create a roadmap to application modernization.
What is a software defined data center (SDDC)?
Organizations clearly saw the advantages and necessity of pooling IT infrastructure resources in their virtualization quests that started with servers. Isolating computing resources from physical hardware reduces hardware expenditures and speeds up the procurement processes of IT resources.
Software-defined data centers (SDDC) culminate many years of virtualization experience. SDDC carries virtualization from operation to storage and network resources and provides ease of management by offering a single toolset to manage all assets. On the other hand, it makes the IT department’s job easier than ever before with infrastructure management, with principle-based procurement and management automation that accelerates resource allocation and increases efficiency.
Components of a software-defined data center
SDDC gathers virtualized computing, storage, and networking resources on a single platform to manage the integrated IT environment effectively.
Organizations are now adept at virtualizing computing and servers using hypervisors. IT administrators use virtual machines to run many different applications and operating systems on a single server. Organizations have used virtualization extensively for more than 10 years to reduce server sprawl and reduce resource usage.
Like servers, storage virtualization pools resources, eliminating islands of disconnected storage systems. Virtualized storage increases flexibility and scalability by enabling IT to offer storage from the pool without purchasing new capacity. Virtualized storage dynamically manages storage, delivering the capacity each application needs on-demand.
Network virtualization is the final component of SDDC and allows networks to be provisioned and managed independently of physical hardware. The abstraction of resources allows workloads to be more easily moved between data centers without physical constraints. Network virtualization solutions also include security features to protect networks and isolate workloads.
By transforming all virtualization layers into a single solution, cloud-based SDDC creates a single hyperconverged infrastructure that facilitates IT resources as a service. SDDC’s integrated management platform for the entire infrastructure standardizes management across virtualization layers and enables policy-based automation that simplifies operations.
What does SDDC promise for organizations?
SDDC architecture offers organizations both short-term and long-term benefits. The main short-term benefit of the architecture is the increased agility for IT. SDDC significantly reduces the time to provision new resources. It doesn’t take days or weeks to install a new physical server, add more storage capacity to an application, or replace the physical network. Policy-based automation further speeds up the provisioning process, enabling resources to be deployed in minutes.
SDDC also improves infrastructure performance. IT can optimize computing, storage, and networking for any application and workload without making physical changes to the infrastructure.
In the long run, SDDC helps to keep costs under control. Consolidating resources improve infrastructure utilization and eliminate the need for new infrastructure deployments. Efficient use of resources also means less infrastructure is idle, thus requiring less physical space, power, and cooling. SDDC enables the transition from CAPEX to OPEX model without large upfront capital expenditures when implemented with hybrid or public cloud infrastructure.
SDDC also contributes to creating a roadmap towards infrastructure and application modernization, respectively, the first and fourth pillars of Netas’ unique digital transformation formula. Standardization with a single management platform enables easier integration of new technologies and migration of workloads to cloud environments.
Cloud-based SDDC
Cloud services and tools tremendously facilitate and accelerate the transition to SDDC architecture. Implementing SDDC on cloud-based infrastructure reduces the time and associated risks required to redesign existing infrastructures.
It is possible to create a completely new environment in the cloud and eliminate all capital expenditures with a cloud-based SDDC. At the same time, existing infrastructures can be leveraged in hybrid environments, using the cloud to expand resources without having to purchase and deploy more physical systems.
Cloud-based infrastructure offers the chance to increase capacity and access the latest technologies without constantly upgrading physical systems. Deploying SDDC in the cloud ensures high application performance and sufficient capacity to support data growth without large capital expenditures.
Leveraging public cloud services for enterprise users and developers without IT oversight can pose security, governance, and legal issues. With the right cloud-based SDDC solution, you can be sure that all users accessing cloud resources comply with internal policies and external regulations.
Cisco SDDC solutions add cloud-level speed and agility to infrastructures
Netas, the technology company that best describes digital transformation, offers Cisco software-defined data center (SDDC) solutions to create purpose-based infrastructures that make it easier to manage resources such as network, storage, and computing, which were formerly siloed in IT environments.
Cisco SDDC solutions, implemented with Netas expertise, provide the automation and efficiency needed to achieve more in less time, at a lower cost, and with fewer resources. Let’s take a closer look at Cisco SDDC solutions that enable centralized management of all infrastructure on a single platform:
- Cisco ACI
Cisco ACI is a cloud-based and software-defined solution. It lays the foundation for zero interruption network infrastructures. Increasing application agility by facilitating data center automation; this solution also leverages policy-based automation to improve network segmentation, security, and management.
Cisco ACI automatically transforms business and user purposes into policies and uses these policies to provide network, security, and infrastructure services. Providing organizations with seamless, highly available, and self-optimizing networks. The solution accelerates network operations and delivers superior application experiences.
- Cisco Intersight
The Cisco Intersight solution, which you can customize according to your unique needs with the service and product options offered by Netas, is a SaaS platform that performs the management, automation, and optimization of computing infrastructures and applications across data centers, edge and cloud environments.
Cisco Intersight provides a single platform to gain complete control over all your environments, from servers to containers, applications, and infrastructure.
- Cisco Secure Workload
Bringing security closer to applications, Cisco Secure Workload ensures that all applications and infrastructure are protected, regardless of where they are hosted. Protecting data in a zero-trust framework, the platform proactively reduces risks by automatically detecting anomalies, vulnerabilities, and risks in workloads. Detecting workload behavior deviations and vulnerabilities associated with software packages, the solution monitors application components to ensure policy compliance.
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