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 Storage
Virtualized environments—in which compute resources are allocated on demand—have created a need for dynamic storage allocation. Software Defined Storage meets the challenge by abstracting storage resources to enable pooling, replication, and on-demand distribution. The result is a storage layer with agility similar to that of virtualized compute: aggregated, flexible, efficient, and capable of elastic scale-out. Software-Defined Storage introduces the capability to pool storage arrays into logical pools (storage profiles) that can then be mapped to virtual data centers.
Profile-Driven Storage
Profile-Driven Storage improves agility and reduces the complexity and administrative coordination required to properly allocate storage. Administrators gain deep visibility into storage pools, to quickly ascertain that available resources can meet required application service levels. Streamline storage provisioning by managing initial and ongoing VM placement based on pre-defined requirements, and provision datastores at scale instead of case-by-case at the VM level.
Storage DRS
Storage DRS capabilities aggregate the resources of several datastores into a single datastore cluster. VMs are automatically assigned to the optimal storage location, based on I/O load and available storage capacity. To ensure adequate space and avoid bottlenecks, Storage DRS continuously monitors storage capacity and I/O utilization, and performs ongoing load balancing between datastores based on pre-defined rules. All in all, Storage DRS improves service levels for all applications while simplifying storage management at scale.
A Distributed Storage Model
VMware’s vision for Software-Defined Storage embraces distributed storage (previewed at VMworld in 2012), which pools internal server disks to create shared resources for virtual machines. Other previewed technologies include a new method for storage arrays to communicate with virtual or cloud environments (virtual volumes), and better ways to leverage Flash-based storage.
