Real Tech with WEI - Journey to the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

Chris Lessard:

Welcome to Real Tech with WEI. I'm Chris Lessard, Director of Business Development and today we have Dave Fafel, our Chief Architect. Today's topic, the Software Defined Data Center. Dave, let's get into it. What is the Software Defined Data Center?

Dave Fafel:

Sure. The Software Defined data Center is really a combination of multiple traditional components such as compute, storage and network that are now managed and controlled in software. It's the ability to separate the control plane from the data plane in our IT environment. In the past, traditionally, for instance, if we wanted to configure a network switch, we would have to plug into the console, configure that switch and move onto the next one and do the same thing. Now, we can actually configure and manage all of those switches from a central location, completely virtualized and that the brains of that switch and all the other components in our data center are actually residing in software as opposed to on the hardware device that we're managing.

Chris Lessard:

Time is everything for a business organization. What does being software defined give back to the business?

Dave Fafel:

Well, it enables the business to be able to make changes and deploy and provision more quickly than ever before. Businesses are demanding that IT organizations deliver services quickly, sometimes instantaneously and software defined components allow us to architect and orchestrate and provision almost on demand.

Chris Lessard:

Let's say you have a legacy data center built 10 years ago, do I have to build an entire new data center or is there a strategy here that I can take?

Dave Fafel:

Yeah, no. You don't have to replace your entire data center. You don't have to forklift your entire environment. In fact, many of our customers continue to realize the investment they have in their existing infrastructure. What we've done is to help them start a journey to a software defined environment by utilizing the equipment they currently have and implementing new tools to be able to automate the management and control of those devices.

Chris Lessard:

What are some of the lessons customers have learned on this journey to software defined?

Dave Fafel:

Well, software defined technologies have been maturing over the last couple years at a pretty dramatic rate. What customers have realized is that, implementing software defined technologies doesn't need to be a science experiment in their environment. There's a lot of easy ways to get started with it. Hyper converged solutions are a great example of that. That's really, software defined data center in a box. There are a lot of tools out there that are easy to get started with, that have done a lot of leg work for us. Implementing some of those tools is easier than ever before. What we really want to focus on however, is what are the areas of our environment that are going to be the best to start with? Such as our network environment, such as our storage environment. Where is it going to give us and deliver the most bang for the buck?

Chris Lessard:

Dave, how can customers start? What should they virtualize?

Dave Fafel:

There's a lot of areas of opportunity, especially in traditional data center environments. We find that many customers have already begun their journey to the software defined data center and they don't even know it. If you've got any level of virtualization on VM-ware platform, Microsoft, CycloV, what have you, you've already begun part of that. You probably already got some virtualized networking built into your environment today. What we want to do is expand and extend on that. Major manufacturers like Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Dell EMC have a lot of software defined technologies to bring to bare and because those are very prevalent technologies already in a data center environment, we want to take a look at expanding on those, implementing some of those new technologies while still taking advantage and realizing the investment our customers have already made in their existing infrastructure.

Chris Lessard:

Well Dave, thanks for joining us today. This has been Real Tech with WEI. We'll see you next time.