By David Gallant, VMWare Professional Services Consultant
Lately I’ve been receiving requests from customers to talk to them about the software-defined data center (SDDC). So I start to explain software-defined networking, software-defined storage, automated provisioning, and self-service portals.
And that’s when I notice the customer looking excited, but also slightly confused.
Last week at SAP TechEd 2013, I was in the middle of just such a talk when I decided to stop and I ask the customer why he looked puzzled.
His response? “That’s great, but what do I do with all that SDDC stuff?”
That’s when the light bulb came on. He was right to question me—why build a software-defined data center if you have no clue what you’re going to do with it?
To really harvest the investment in your SDDC, you need to be building toward a specific set of goals. We don’t build data centers without a purpose; and that purpose for SDDC, as it’s always been, is the application.
In most cases the best data centers have been purpose-designed and built around the organization’s business-critical applications; for instance SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft applications.
I’ll concentrate for now on SAP—if you can architect an SDDC for SAP, you can roll those concepts over to pretty much any other application. Continue reading