This talk gives a quick intro what’s come to be known as software-defined data center. Its enablers are recent hardware trends combined with advances in software technology that together allow creating an infrastructure that makes life a lot easier for operations.

2. • Software is Eating the Data Center
• Dr. Matthias Grawinkel - Quobyte Engineering

3. Google Data Center
~1999
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By Erik Pitti from San Diego, CA, USA - Google's First Server
Uploaded by Mewtu, CC BY 2.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8724999

4. Google Data Center
Today
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5. Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Attempt to Define
• Virtualized infrastructure, decoupled from hardware
• Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS)
• “Cloud Computing”
• Software defined:
• Compute
• Networking
• Storage
• Management and automation software
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6. Software-Defined Data Center
User Perspective
• Easy and cheap access to
complex infrastructures
• Reproducible
• Infrastructure as code
• High agility
• Up within short time
• Elastic
• Add or remove resources
on demand
• Pay what you use
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curl -X POST https://teh.cloud
…
Magic

7. Software-Defined Data Center
Operator Perspective
• Centralized infrastructure management
• High degree of automation
• Provision full clusters within minutes
• Scalable operations
• Effective
• High resource utilization
• Isolated clients on shared hardware
• Economies of scale
• Decoupling of software and hardware life cycles
• Plan for months, not for years
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8. Cloud Computing
Just Someone Else’s Computer?
• Many reasons to go
private / public / hybrid
• Compliance, security, risks
• Control and ownership
• Costs of
• Compute
• Storage
• Data transfer
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Hybrid
Private Public

9. Software-Defined Data Center
Enablers
• Commoditization of hardware
• Combine what you need
• Building blocks
• Fast networking
• Advances in infrastructure research and software
• Economic drivers
• Software is eating the world…
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10. Pets vs Cattle
How do You Name Your Servers?
• Pets
• Have a name
• Manually built and managed: “hand-fed”
• Indispensable, always available
• Scale-Up
• Cattle
• Have a metro/room/rack/slot number
• Built and managed with automated tools
• Designed for failure
• API driven, on-demand
• Scale-Out
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11. Software-Defined Compute
Compute the Bits
• Bare-metal provisioning
• Hypervisors to run virtual computers
• Near bare-metal performance
• Full operating systems
• Unikernels
• Containerization (Shared kernel)
• Namespaces and cgroups
• Userspace containers
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12. Software-Defined Compute
With Hardware Support
• CPU
• Slicing of physical cores
• Managing privileged and guest modes
• PCI devices
• Isolated or shared access to PCI devices
• I.e. direct access to network card from multiple VMs (SR-IOV)
• GPUs, TPUs, Accelerators, …
• GPU Virtualization
• Time slices of video coder
• Physical slices of RAM and shaders engines
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13. Software-Defined Networking (SDN)
Transfer the Bits
• High-performance data plane with control mechanisms
• Configurable control plane through software
• Virtual overlay decoupled from physical network
• Secure and private overlay networks on shared physical hardware
• Build switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers in software
• Physical networks are FAST! 40G is common, 100G backbones available, 10
microseconds roundtrip times
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14. Software-Defined Storage (SDS)
Network fabrics drive SDS
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• Fast networks enable disaggregation of storage
• Local is not necessarily faster than remote storage
• Physical location does not matter anymore
• Storage consumers are not physically tied to their storage anymore

15. Software-Defined Storage
Persist the Bits
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• Runs on commodity hardware
• Converged compute + storage hosts
• Logical data fully decoupled from physical storage
• Flexible reconfiguration of logical storage
• Elastic operations
• Add or remove servers and storage devices
• Multi-tenancy: Isolated access on shared hardware
• Scalability, reliability, fault-tolerance based on algorithms

16. Software-Defined Data Center
A Blueprint
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• Buy some decent servers and network equipment
• Provision cluster with operating systems (i.e. Foreman, matchbox, …)
• Set up networking
• Set up Orchestrator for VMs, Containers (i.e. Openstack, Kubernetes, …)
• Set up Identity Management
• Deploy software-storage: hyperconverged, standalone, integrated
• Add tools for monitoring, alerting, billing
• Create virtual infrastructure (i.e. Terraform, ansible, …)
• Deploy your applications
• Profit!

17. Software-Defined X
What’s next?
• Software-defined Power?
• Building and infrastructure management are merging
• Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) provides lots of data
• Energy consumption per server / rack
• Cooling systems / heat zones
• States of power supplies / batteries
• Weather forecasts
• Is wind or solar available?
• Control plane for power management and job scheduling?
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18. Conclusion
• The data center is changing, network infrastructure is driving it
• Everything has an API
• Decoupling and virtualization
• Decouple logical from physical configuration
• Decouple availability of service from individual pieces
• Expect failing services, servers, racks, data centers
• Secure layers to isolate processes and network traffic
• Software already ate the data center
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19. • Thank you!