Software Defined Datacenter vs. Cloud - VirtualizedGeek Tech Talk Episode 13
Transcript
virtualized geek tech talks episode 13 software defined data centers hey how's it going you're listening to episode 13 of virtualized geeks tech talks if you haven't noticed i'm a day late if you listen to it later on in the week hey i'm not late we're uh well today is may 14th tuesday and uh tonight's topic is actually software defined data center versus cloud computing i think there's a little confusion obviously between what software-defined data center is and what uh what a cloud is i think uh just similar to uh a little bit ago there might have been confusing confusion around what's virtualization versus cloud computing i think as we as virtualization and software-defined networking and software-defined storage matures into a software-defined data center uh way of delivering technology there can be some confusion about what's the difference between software-defined data center and uh cloud computing so i think the best way to look at this is to look at the nist definition of cloud computing and kind of compare that to software-defined data centers first let's talk about the components of software-defined data center first to make sure we're all on the same page so from a software-defined data center perspective you have three components you have the software-defined networking stack which is uh sdn that can be delivered a number of ways but basically it's a big umbrella to basically say that your network is controlled via software it can be delivered as part of a virtualization strategy hence vmware's nxx platform as well as additional extraction for the control plane but basically that's all uh software enabled and controlled that may actually be a unicorn compared to the other two uh software stacks we're going to talk about the second one is software defined storage which is the ability to abstract storage from the physical layer and present that to your data center via software so just like we're presenting the network via software to our resource consumers we're presenting the uh storage to our uh resource consumers via a software interface so it doesn't matter if you have hit his top his tachi emc white box storage back-ending your storage that's presented to your virtual data center or virtual infrastructure software-defined infrastructure via some type of software interface then of course we have something that we're all very familiar with which is the virtualization stack for compute so your vcenter environment your zen server in your environment your kvm ubuntu chronicle conical whatever you want to use to virtualize workloads uh from an x8 x86 perspective you have those components those are the three components that make up a software defined data center then a course of on kind of the big umbrella that encompasses those three components would be some type of management suite that would manage your uh software-defined data center so now we're going to move the discussion over to cloud and define cloud so cloud is defined by five characteristics uh your cloud your infrastructure has to be elastic so virtualization and software-defined data centers are elastic they have to be measurable the service that they live or deliver have to be measurable i will get to that in a second that can be questionable in your sddc environment the service has to be available over a broad medium such as uh some type of broadband network it can be fiber internet whatever obviously if you're going to go for software-defined network is going to be some type of broad network uh the service needs to be you know i'm forgetting my three i we have elastic we have oh i'm sorry it needs to be pooled and then it also needs to be uh self-service so any user needs to be able to provision the services without the interaction of administrators of your service so you know looking at those five capabilities two of which kind of stand out that software defined data centers don't necessarily have to be uh the service doesn't have to be pooled you don't need uh you don't have to have pool resources uh it doesn't have to be measured and uh the service doesn't have to be measurable so it doesn't have to necessarily be a pay-as-you-go type of model where users get paid for only a limited amount the limited resources or the expansive resources the elastic resources that they use the other three uh software-defined networking kind of falls into so you know why are we talking about cloud computing versus software-defined networking the reason i uh looked at a from the open summit openstack open summit uh forum that happened a couple of weeks ago randy bliss of cloud scaling kind of called sddc a unicorn basically that it's a pie in the sky hyping some strategy that enterprises really can't strive to they can um most definitely implement openstack and openstack type technologies for their uh iit service delivery model uh when it comes to building new applications but when it comes to migrating your data center from kind of the heterogeneous environment where you have a bunch of different technologies back in your data center to something that's software defined where you can control the entire data center from a software stack that that's not quite possible and you know i've given this quite a bit of thought to think you know what is software-defined data center kind of kind of a pie in the sky marketing hype term and i have to be honest with you it may be a little bit uh wishful thinking on my part but i don't think so i think you can actually build a openstack cloud based on a software-defined data center model you know you can take all those components just because um just because cloud is an sddc doesn't mean that uh you can't use sddc to build cloud you know i can make the argument that you can go with a completely software defined uh architecture to build a openstack cloud now the part that i do give randy some credit on is that when you take a look at what it takes to build a true sddc environment you need software-defined networking and to be honest software-defined networking isn't where it needs to be uh networking is still a very protocol driven uh market or a very protocol driven discipline where we're not controlling and don't have the apis from the sdc world to truly drive software or a vcenter type or a v director type control application to completely provision and control a network so in that sense i think sddc might be a at a unicorn state right now but i think long term when you talk about can a organization move to software-defined data center as a strategy and an architecture i think it's possible i think over the next few years sdn will get there the management tools for your software-defined data center will get there and we will move to a model where we can manage an entire data center via some centralized software interface and then provide that infras i'm sorry provide that infrastructure up to uh an openstack a cloud stack or whatever a nebulous or whatever you want to use to provide as an api to your consumers of your cloud and infrastructure well this uh i'm giving you a couple of minutes back of your time we usually go 12 11 to 12 minutes and we're stopping at about 10.
i appreciate you guys listening to virtualized geeks tech talks we'll talk to you next week thanks
