The importance of the control plane in SDDC

I’m at the SDDC Symposium and have heard some really great thought leaders in the different pillars of SDDC. A recurring theme has been the challenges of maturing the control plane to a point that the software defined data center can become a reality. One of the primary challenges has been standards around the control plane. In the ares of both storage in networking there are no clear winners in these new markets.

Without standards, organizations don’t know which set of products to build their SDDC components. As Neeta Jacques of Open Daylight pointed out there is too much risk associated with software defined networking. While everyone in the networking industry agrees that SDN is needed for next generation infrastructures, the industry as a whole can not agree on a method for implementing it.

Without a clear winner, networking stands out as a barrier to the control plan capability needed to implement the SDDC. Jacques believes open source projects such as Open Daylight are ways to gain agreement on interoperability if not all out standards.

Storage is not in a much better state than networking. One of the critical challenges of storage is the complexity of managing storage. Andy Warfield of Coho pointed out that if your storage platform requires a human to manage the environment then it’s too complicated to automate. Automation is a prerequisite to the SDDC.

Again, this is a deeper dive into why virtualization isn’t enough to build a SDDC. The control of the underlying infrastructure is arguably the most important part of building the SDDC.