If you're involved with virtualization or any form of IT infrastructure, you're probably paying attention to SDDC (software-defined data center) concepts, as well you should.
It's a powerful set of ideas: by abstracting intelligence into software, the IT world becomes a better place: more agile, more controllable, and more efficient. Infrastructure behavior will be ideally driven by the application workload at hand, and not pre-ordained.
As the three core infrastructure categories pass through the SDDC wormhole, they are inevitably altered.
For example, how we thought about servers five years ago in the physical world is nothing like we think about them today: servers are now abstracted, dynamic, resizable, and relocatable virtual entities -- all thanks to virtualization.
Now both networking and storage are approaching the same event horizon as server and compute did years before. And both will look very different before long.
This inevitability is not lost on industry storage vendors, either. To date, we've heard much about software-defined storage from EMC, NetApp and HP. We will eventually hear from HDS and IBM, and maybe even Dell. And, of course, no shortage of small, nimble startups that smell an opportunity.
Where are the flags being planted? Is there any consistency in the perspectives? How do various vendor views stack up? And what might we see in the future?
In this post, I'll vainly attempt to be an impartial industry observer. I do admit I have my favorite horses in this race, though …
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