If you’ve never watched these Youtube videos from Cisco you should check them out.  They are almost as good as my Tech Talks .  At the end of most of them they decide what part of the technology discussed is the unicorn.  Meaning what is realistic today and what still needs to mature.  The topic of this particular post was about the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC).  I think SDDC is somewhat a unicorn in itself.  Which makes the type of Cloud Management that brings value to organizations another unicorn.

To have SDDC you need to have mature Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Storage (SDS) and even if it’s not a proper term let’s keep it rolling Software Defined Compute (SDC).  Of the three SDC is obviously very mature.  It doesn’t matter if we are talking VMware, KVM, XEN or Hyper-V.  It seems as if vendors have SDC under control.  It’s the other two area’s that have some work in the form of both standards and an actual operating model in the case of SDN.

Looking at SDS as it kind of exists in various technical forms.  Vendors have virtualized or abstracted storage for a long time now.  You can present storage in a SDDC no matter what the backend physical components make up the block layer storage.  Using controller software you can present NFS, SMB or LUN’s to clients using these underlying protocols.  The physical storage can be white box servers with SATA drives or an EMC VMAX with a tray of Solid State Drives (SSD).  The gray is when it comes to having visibility into the abstracting and presenting the different capabilities of the underlying storage.  Each vendor goes about it in a different way.  There a great write up on Duncan Epping’s Yellow-Bricks site that goes into detail on the state of SDS.

Then there’s SDN.  I won’t repeat a lot of the challenges that face SDN but if you want to start here on this blog.

This brings us back to Cloud Management.  Ultimately you have to ask yourself what capabilities would you like in a Cloud Management solution.  Some of which depends on if you are looking to extend your infrastructure or develop cloud aware applications.  The difference can basically be broken down into the vCloud vs. OpenStack question. But ultimately you want to be able to deliver as much control via abstraction to the SDDC components of your cloud without concern of the underlying hardware.  You want the end user of the Cloud Management solution to be able to select the storage attributes related to their service, the network attributes, along with the compute attributes.

Most mature Cloud Management systems allow you accomplish these goals by interfacing directly with the API’s of the individual vendors of these products.  You want to deliver a “Fast” pool of disk to your application.  Well today the Cloud Management solutions need to communicate directly with the API’s of your storage vendor.  What if you want multiple storage vendors in the backend?  This is where SDS with standards will step in and help.  The current approach is for solutions like OpenStack to build that capability hardwired into the Cloud Management platform.  When the unicorn of Cloud Management is reached there will not be a need to hard wire the capability.  The ideal future your “Fast” storage can be backend by VMAX SSD’s or Hitachi SSD’s without making major configuration changes to your Cloud Management platform.  It would just be done at the middleware layer that’s SDS.

I actually started this post to just be a link the the video.  But hey I like to talk.