What’s All The Software Defined Fuss About? Busting Myths From VMworld

Talking with people at VMworld in San Francisco and Barcelona, it was clear that software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined data centers (SDDC) were a major area of focus for most businesses. These topics are vital to the evolution of virtualization and cloud infrastructure but media hype is already starting to distort the realities they present to the enterprise.

SDN is the hottest technology buzz term in the industry right now. Most enterprises have already migrated to cloud and/or virtualized infrastructure and SDN is positioned as the next logical step towards the Promised Land. The operational and management issues regarding network virtualization are a topic that has not been discussed in any depth, yet has the potential to dramatically affect the success of an SDN initiative.

Users will get stalled on the SDN adoption curve—just as they did with server virtualization—due to operational dynamics within the virtual environment. Businesses that put workloads on a platform that compete for the same resources will experience significant performance issues, the death knell for any IT initiative. This problem is compounded in highly regulated industries where technical constraints are imposed on specific applications and data sets. Visibility into the virtual environment is critical to ensure applications have the resources they need to operate reliably.

The SDDC vision is only partially realized by VMworld attendees —and the industry at large. The focus, based on standard adoption curves, is to deal with infrastructure first, operational and management issues second and optimization of everything third. While parts of the SDDC infrastructure are in place, the focus has not yet shifted to controlling the virtual data center in an automated way via software. The prevailing wisdom from most major vendors is to use tools that take a non-automated, “bottom up” Big Data approach. While dashboards and alerts for various data center components in IT operations are important for administrators, they do not focus on the applications’ performance and user experience. It’s the equivalent of a plumber installing a new sink for you and then leaving without testing it to see if water comes out. No matter the sophistication of the cloud or virtualized environment, if business workers cannot leverage the applications they need to complete their function, all of IT’s hard work is for naught.

What VMworld crystallized for me was that software-defined solutions – as they have been positioned by vendors and understood by IT personnel – are primarily about plumbing. Administrators are currently focused on how to create and configure their cloud and virtualized infrastructure. What is lost in all of this hype is resource management. Resource management is an afterthought for most IT administrators to be taken care of by “other management tools.” The folly in this philosophy is that it creates a huge operational efficiency problem when the initial constructs will not reflect the workload demand and will have to be adjusted later in a reactive, more costly, manner. Enterprises must ensure the availability and performance of the end-to-end IT infrastructure in order to support the service level requirements of the applications on which their businesses run.

VMworld demonstrated that today’s IT administrators are struggling to meet these challenges because their focus is partitioned by technology and function. They focus on data collection and threshold-based alerting, with little intelligence about automating decision-making. IT administrators have essentially been brainwashed to confuse visualization with control. Virtualization – and the agility it offers – introduces dramatic opportunities to manage differently and reduce labor-intensive management tasks. Now businesses must remove their focus from the plumbing of their cloud and virtualized infrastructure so they can fully realize the operational and financial benefits of their investments.

By Shmuel Kliger

Metasploit-Penetration-Testing-Software-Pen-Testing-Security
Vulnerability Scanners Cyber security vulnerabilities are a constant nuisance and it certainly doesn't help with the world in a current state of disarray and uncertainty. Vulnerabilities leave businesses and individuals subject to a wide range ...
Cybersecurity Bootcamps To Help Build Your Career
Cybersecurity Bootcamps We've discussed the importance of training and the hiring of cybersecurity professionals many times on CloudTweaks over the past 10+ years. Now more than ever as the world enters into a dark era ...
Martin Mendelsohn
The Colonial Pipeline Dilemma The Colonial Pipeline is one of a number of essential energy and infrastructure assets that have been recently targeted by the global ransomware group DarkSide, and other aspiring non-state actors, with ...
Steve Prentice
The Era of Microlearning Becoming employable and then staying employable requires ongoing, up to date knowledge, and this can become something of a dilemma. Many of us grew up with a traditional understanding of the ...
Gilad David Maayan
What is SASE (Secure Access Service Edge)? SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) is a term coined by Gartner to refer to a new architecture for networking and security that combines both functions into a single, ...
10 Leading Open Source Business Intelligence Tools
Open Source Business Intelligence Tools It’s impossible to take the right business decisions without having insightful information to back up the decision-making process. Open Source Business Intelligence Tools make it easier to have our raw ...
Mark Greenlaw
Free Cloud Migrations are Expensive The cloud is becoming the primary place where work gets done. By 2025, Gartner estimates that enterprise spending on public cloud computing will overtake traditional IT hardware. Why? One reason ...
Mark Banfield
Implement A Seamless Customer Experience The need for digital interaction has never seemed more critical than it does today. As the coronavirus continues to spread, citizens around the world are being asked to hunker down ...
The Backup.png
The Sticky Note.png
Answer To Everything.png
Cloud For Dummies.png

PLURALSITE

Pluralsight provides online courses on popular programming languages and developer tools. Other courses cover fields such as IT security best practices, server infrastructure, and virtualization. 

(ISC)²

(ISC)² provides IT training, certifications, and exams that run online, on your premises, or in classrooms. Self-study resources are available. You can also train groups of 10 or more of your employees.

CYBRARY

CYBRARY Open source Cyber Security learning. The world's largest cyber security community. Cybrary provides free IT training certificates. Courses for beginners, intermediates, and advanced users are available.