What is the true meaning of a software-defined data center?

Everyone knows how the Internet was born: the military needed a redundant "network" and then solved the problem of how to use existing network devices and new protocols to achieve this goal. Today's history seems to be repeating this story. Once again, we need to build a software-defined network software-defined data center with the existing infrastructure.

Just as the world changes after an isolated network is connected to the Internet, computing is changing after the "Data Center" is abstracted from the hardware placed in various physical locations. This ubiquitous abstraction allows us to connect, aggregate, and configure computing resources in an unprecedented way.

Fully virtualized world

Virtualization is an important enabler for software-defined data centers. We can now Virtualize and pool three key computing resources, namely servers, storage and networks. At the same time, we are gradually approaching a complex critical point. Once we reach this critical point, we will be able to segment, segment, and recombine these pooled virtual resources as we wish.

Network virtualization is an immature technology that enables software-defined data centers. However, Arista, Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware are all working in this regard-VMware even acquired Nicira for this-they aim to enable virtual networks to be pre-configured and pre-scalable, it can even be quickly and conveniently migrated across physical networks as we have created and migrated virtual servers.

What does this mean for implementing a software defined data center? Imagine that we can configure a data center by swiping the mouse to meet the needs of key applications, and configure pooled resources point by point to meet the needs of key applications. Multiple Software-defined data centers can share physical infrastructure. Each tenant can have its own virtual network, its own identity and authentication mechanism, without restrictions on the availability and scalability of traditional VLANs.

Various standards in evolution

Early cases of such software-defined infrastructure surfaced last week, when eBay publicly announced that it was using OpenStack and Nicira virtualization platforms (NVP ). However, to develop network virtualization, standardization must first take root. Currently, network Virtualization has two competing standards: VXLAN and NVGRE. Standard InterfaceOpenFlow ProtocolThe stack supports VXLAN, and OpenFlow is well supported by most network device vendors.

Another major headache is the Quantum standard, which is the network component of the OpenStack project. Quantum provides network resource abstraction at the application layer and provides an API on a virtual switch (such as Cisco's Nexus product line or Open source vSwitch. This fall, we will see the first OpenStack version with the upgrade of the Quantum and Compute (Nova) components.

Although InfoWorld has widely reported OpenStack, it is important to point out that OpenStack alone cannot implement software-defined data centers. It only supports access to various solutions, such as red hat KVM for server virtualization, or Nicira a management framework in NVP for network virtualization. But it is also clear that OpenStack will play a key role in the evolution of software-defined data centers. VMware is not a major vendor that provides support for it. It promised to "add value and more choices" for OpenStack when acquiring Nicira ", nicira has been leading the development of Quantum and Open vSwitch.

Software-defined everything

Is "software-defined data center" another name for "Cloud? Not all. I think the cloud is a marketing term that promotes applications, platforms, or infrastructure services to internal and external customers. I hope to encourage users to purchase as needed through Web. The software-defined data center is a mechanism through which cloud services can be delivered most effectively.

With the gradual implementation of network virtualization, the most short-term benefit for enterprises is to ease the network bottleneck in the virtualization process. The initiation and migration of virtual machines have become too easy. However, in order to adapt to the huge changes brought by the increase of virtual server load, manual operations are required for the network configuration. This situation will change in the next few years.

But in the long run, who can tell where the software-defined data center will guide us? In fact, software-defined data centers are just the beginning, because computing, storage, and network hardware do not have enough capacity to adapt to the daily overhead of virtualization.

This is what we are going to do now. Soon, we will be able to repeat a variety of new data center architectures across public and private infrastructure. This is like none of the people who worked in ARPANET in the 1970s s could predict the appearance of YouTube, no one can predict where this ability to freely allocate and configure a large number of virtualized resources will take us.