As we embark in the era of “cloud first” being business as usual for operations, one of the acronyms flying aground the industry is SDDC or the Software Defined Data Center.  The term, very familiar to me since starting with Forrester less than six months ago, has become an increasing topic of conversation with Forrester clients and vendors alike. It is germane to my first Forrester report “Infrastructure as Code, The Missing Element In The I&O Agenda”, where I discuss the changing role of I&O pros from building and managing physical hardware to abstracting configurations as code. The natural extension of this is the SDDC.

 

We believe that the SDDC is an evolving architectural and operational philosophy rather that simply a product that you purchase. It is rooted in a series of fundamental architectural constructs built on modular standards-based infrastructure, virtualization of and at all layers, with complete orchestration and automation.

 

The Forrester definition of the SDDC is:

 

A SDDC is an integrated abstraction model that defines a complete data center by means of a layer of software that presents the resources of the data center as pools of virtual and physical resources, and allows them to be composed into arbitrary user-defined services.

 

My inquiries on the topic of the SDDC are increasing as part of my research. My colleague Rich Fichera and I have commenced a Vendor Landscape looking the current vendors in the market, their solutions and their thoughts on where this market segment is heading.  As part of this research we would like to hear from clients that have embarked on their SDDC journey and their experiences to date to shape the research. If you have a story, feel free to drop me a note at RStroud@forrester.com and we will set up some time to chat.

 

I look forward to hearing from you soon!