The Software-Defined Data Center is a unified data center platform that provides unprecedented automation, flexibility, and efficiency to transform the way you deliver IT. Compute, storage, networking, security, and availability services are pooled, aggregated, and delivered as software, and managed by intelligent, policy-driven software. Self-service, policy-based provisioning, automated infrastructure, and application and business management complete the picture. The result is a data center optimized for the cloud era, providing unmatched business agility, the highest SLAs for all applications, dramatically simpler operations, and lower costs.
UPCOMING WEBCAST 2/27/2013: Software-defined Datacenter with Paul Strong, CTO, Global Field - A free session with live Q+A around transforming the way you deliver IT.
Software-Defined Networking
Traditional networking is one of the greatest barriers to data center flexibility. Network operations still require manual, device-by-device provisioning. Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) are a headache to manage, with numerous individual devices tied together by intricate and often vendor-specific interfaces. Software-Defined Networking bypasses this complexity.
Simplified, Automated Network Provisioning and Deployment
As server virtualization did for computing, Software-Defined Networking decouples networking services from the underlying physical network hardware. Agile and secure virtual networks can then be easily created, programmatically provisioned, attached to workloads, and placed, moved or scaled on demand—even across clusters, pods, and metro-clusters.
Dynamic Network Reconfiguration and Reduced VLAN Overhead
When an application needs to be moved to another part of the data center, a new network path is created dynamically, on demand, in a software-driven action. Software-Defined Networking also takes network services, such as core access and load balancing, out of network hardware and embodies them in software that “lives” and moves with applications.
VXLAN, VMware’s software-driven virtual LAN standard, enables a virtual machine to be easily transferred to wherever pooled compute capacity is available at any given time. Freed from physical constraints, the network can extend beyond a single site to any data center in the world.
Operations become dramatically simpler and less costly, and IT gains the agility to rapidly deploy, move, and scale applications and data in response to business needs.
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