A Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) virtualizes all infrastructure components such as networking, storage, CPU, and security, delivering them as a service managed through a single software layer. It addresses challenges like capacity management, multi-cloud environments, and configuration management while providing benefits such as cost efficiency, rapid application deployment, and enhanced IT control. SDDC represents the future of data centers, supporting various cloud architectures and automating processes for improved business agility.

1. Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) refers to a data center where all infrastructures --
networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service. Deployment,
provisioning, configuration and operation of the entire infrastructure is abstracted from hardware
and implemented through software.
With SDDC, the entire data center will be controlled using a single virtualization layer. This
means that all aspects of the infrastructure can be managed and controlled from one end to the
other.
Three major building blocks of SDDC
 Network virtualization
 Storage virtualization
 Server virtualization
Challenges solved by using SDDC
1) Capacity management: One of the first steps in a SDDC migration is to ensure that your data
center/IT shop has enough capacity for the needs of the organization, applications and services.
2) Multi-virtualization and multi-cloud management platforms: Data centers will have
complicated architectures. It’s usually a mix of technologies from multiple different providers. A
key to managing this complex, heterogeneous environment is to have a multi-virtualization and
multi-cloud management platform.
3) Configuration management: Another key to a true SDDC approach is to move from a manual
to automatic provisioning of resources based on the applications need.
Benefits of SDDC

2. In a software-defined data center, policy-driven automation enables provisioning and ongoing
management of logical compute, storage and network services. The result is unprecedented IT
agility and efficiency, with flexibility to support today and tomorrow’s hardware and
applications. Benefits include:
 Virtualization economics across your data center – Software-defined data center
technology helps attain new levels of infrastructure utilization and staff productivity,
substantially reducing both capital expenditures and operating costs.
 Applications at business speed – Enabling deployment of applications in minutes or
even seconds with policy-driven provisioning that dynamically matches resources to
continually changing workloads and business demands.
 Business-aware IT control – Driving right availability, security and compliance for
every application via automated business continuity, policy-based governance and
virtualization-aware security and compliance.
 Your data center on your terms – The software-defined data center can be leveraged as
a private, hybrid or public cloud—in each case, infrastructure is fully abstracted from
applications so they can run on multiple hardware stacks, hypervisors and clouds.
Future of SDDC:
Software-defined data center (SDDC) is the ideal architecture for private, public, and hybrid
clouds. SDDC extends the virtualization concepts you know— abstraction, pooling and
automation — to all data center resources and services. The software-defined data center
approach will force IT organizations to adapt architecting software-defined environments, which
requires rethinking many IT processes—including automation, metering, and billing—and
executing service delivery, service activation, and service assurance.
A widespread transition to the SDDC could take years, enterprise IT will have to become truly
business-focused, automatically placing application workloads where they can be best processed.
Each step of the journey will lead to efficiency gains and make the IT organization more and
more service oriented.
Overall, the idea of the SDDC is to provide an additional layer of abstraction above the hardware
components, public and private cloud, which “empowers applications to define their own
environments, based on performance, security, availability and further policy requirements."
A SDDC can lead to faster provisioning of resources, which can lead to happier end users. More
than 70% of end users expect an IT project to take less than two weeks. Meanwhile, IT
professionals say they don’t have the tools needed to speed up delivery: 40% of IT managers said
there is a slow manual process to reconfigure infrastructure to accommodate changes requested
by the business units. SDDC the "golden path" for dealing with these IT management issues.

3. Software-defined data centers are considered by many to be the next step in the evolution of
virtualization and cloud computing as it provides a solution to support both legacy enterprise
applications and new cloud computing services.
Rob Jenkins, European director for VMware advisory services, claims that building large-scale
datacenters from standard high-volume servers was inefficient and complex, both for cloud
service providers and large enterprises.
“Besides, it is not very reliable, which is why SDDC is the future,” Jenkins says.
References
http://www.infoworld.com/t/data-center/what-the-software-defined-data-center-really-means-
199930?page=0,1
http://searchsdn.techtarget.com/definition/software-defined-data-center-SDDC
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/software_defined_data_center_SDDC.html
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/022014-software-defined-data-center-278948.html
http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-centers/the-software-defined-data-center-potential-
game-changer/a/d-id/1234724?
http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Software-defined-datacentres-demystified
http://www.vmware.com/software-defined-datacenter/#sthash.kGtNzVVe.dpuf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_data_center
http://www.zdnet.com/does-a-software-defined-datacenter-mean-changes-in-staff-roles-
7000028597/