The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC): Separating the Reality from the Hype with Kenneth Hui

If you are in Enterprise IT, particularly if you work with data center technologies, then there is no escape from hearing about the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). It seems every vendor who has software running on commodity x86 hardware has declared themselves to be software-defined. What’s surprising is that vendors aren’t already advertising software-defined televisions and computers. But the folks in the data center trenches know that just declaring something software-defined doesn’t necessarily make it so, even if they aren’t exactly sure what SDDC even means. So how do we separate the reality from the hype? Is the SDDC something to embrace or to ignore? If it’s something we need to know, how do we start? Is it as simple as standing up a VMware SDDC stack in AWS?

To know where the future of SDDC is headed, we need to know what happened in the past. So, let’s review a history of software-defined “whatever” in the data center including how it began (hint: it did not start with VMware), what were the goals for the technology, why it matters, and where we stand with the SDDC today (It’s mostly marketecture but you already suspected that). We will explore how vendors have used and sometimes misused the terms and the concepts behind SDDC and what it would really mean to have a true software defined data center.

Attendees will go away with a historical context for understanding the SDDC and some working definitions for it that will help them to evaluate vendor claims. They will also learn some tools and approaches that will help them to learn more about the topic, so they can make their own evaluations on the validity and the applicability of this much ballyhooed technology.

Presenter: Kenneth Hui is a Technical Marketing Engineer at Rubrik who is passionate about helping customers with building great solutions leveraging technologies such as VMware, OpenStack, AWS, Azure and containers. Ken lives in New York City where he can indulge in his love of great food from all around the world.