Today’s IT leaders must transform IT from a cost center into the heart of growth. This means IT must dramatically change how it delivers services to the business. IT must move away from the monolithic static model, embracing a high level of agility, so it can immediately respond to business requirements. Virtualization has been a game-changing technology in the data center. It has allowed IT to consolidate physical servers and create agility at the compute layer. Additionally, the rise of server virtualization has allowed companies to deliver compute as-a-service.

1. The Software-Defined Data Center
is Key to IT-as-a-Service
August 2013
Prepared by:
Zeus Kerravala

2. The Software-Defined Data Center is Key to IT-as-a-Service
by Zeus Kerravala
August 2013
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Introduction: IT-as-a-Service Becomes a Reality
The role of the CIO has changed more in the past decade than any other position in
business. Historically, the CIO and IT department have been responsible for
managing and running the technology infrastructure, and had had little to do with
driving the business forward. Today, CIOs and IT leaders must deploy technology to
drive business growth and be catalysts for change.
Nowhere has this change been more acute than in the data center. Legacy IT was
built on dedicated, physical infrastructure. While this offered adequate performance
and reliability, service delivery was slow and inefficient, and resource utilization was
poor. Some new applications could take IT months to deploy, hampering
competitiveness.
Today’s IT leaders must transform IT from a cost center into the heart of growth. This
means IT must dramatically change how it delivers services to the business. IT must
move away from the monolithic static model, embracing a high level of agility, so it
can immediately respond to business requirements.
Virtualization has been a game-changing technology in the data center. It has
allowed IT to consolidate physical servers and create agility at the compute layer.
Additionally, the rise of server virtualization has allowed companies to deliver
compute as-a-service. This is one reason there are currently more virtual workloads
deployed than physical workloads today (Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1: Server Virtualization is Now the Dominant Compute Model
What percent of your workloads are virtualized vs. five years ago?
Source: ZK Research, 2013
The next wave of virtualization will create broader agility and flexibility across the
technology stack to allow IT to be delivered as-a-service. ITaaS means better
alignment between IT and business goals, and should be a top initiative for all CIOs.
However, delivering on the vision of ITaaS requires IT to shed legacy provisioning
and management thinking and migrate to a software-defined data center (SDDC).
SDDC is the foundation and will be the first incarnation of ITaaS.
ZK Research
A Division of Kerravala
Consulting
zeus@zkresearch.com
Cell: 301-775-7447
Office: 978-252-5314
Influence and insight
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© 2013 ZK Research
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3. The Software-Defined Data Center is Key to IT-as-a-Service 3
Section II: Defining the Software-Defined
Data Center
Server virtualization has been a core technology in
the data center for more than a decade. Decoupling
the compute functionality from the physical platform
allowed organizations to consolidate infrastructure
but more importantly, enable a level of resiliency,
agility and automation not possible with legacy
infrastructure. It’s time for the data center to take the
next evolutionary step forward — and that’s to
transition to a SDDC.
During the last decade, server virtualization brought
an unparalleled level of automation, flexibility and
agility to the compute industry. The vision of SDDC
is to bring these attributes to the entire application
delivery stack — from the network to applications.
The SDDC is an evolutionary leap forward for the
data center. The SDDC vision sees components that
make up the data center as fluid resources that can
be dynamically allocated to applications based upon
prevailing business needs. Integrating the many
components of service delivery and combining them
with holistic orchestration capabilities enable the
fluidity that can deliver on the vision of ITaaS.
The SDDC changes the traditional relationship of
service components as separate silos to that of
peers (Exhibit 2), and can enable creation of new
services or modification of existing ones as a single
event rather than a number of discrete ones.
Juxtapose this with the highly error-prone, time-
consuming multitask processes of legacy data
centers and it’s clear the SDDC delivers a level of
operational efficiency and speed of service creation
that cannot be accomplished without this shift.
Exhibit 2: Resource Silos Evolve to Peer Relationships
Source: ZK Research, 2013
Organizations that adopt SDDC will realize the
following benefits (Exhibit 3):
• Faster time-to-service: The provisioning time
for new services creation or service
modification within legacy data centers can be
several months. Historically, the independent
deployment and provisioning of servers,
storage, network and other resources has been
highly disjointed and lacked any kind of holistic
control. The introduction of server virtualization
has brought some efficiency to this process and
provisioning time can be reduced to weeks or
even days. However, the SDDC can reduce
provisioning time to just hours, or even
minutes.
© 2013 ZK Research
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4. The Software-Defined Data Center is Key to IT-as-a-Service 4
Exhibit 3: The Benefit of the Software-Defined Data Center
Legacy Data Center Virtual Data Center SDDC
Clearly defined IT silos Forced integration of silos No IT silos
Poor infrastructure
utilization (30%)
Improved infrastructure
utilization (50%)
Optimized infrastructure
utilization (70%+)
No virtualization Virtualization enables
consolidation
Virtualization enables
automation
People are 40% of data
center TCO
People are 30% of data
center TCO
People are 20% of data
center TCO
No orchestration Server/network
orchestration
Full infrastructure
orchestration
Provisioning time is
months
Provisioning time is days Provisioning time is
hours/minutes
Source: ZK Research, 2013
• Centralized management: One of the keys to
a successful SDDC and fulfillment of the vision
of ITaaS is having a centralized point of control.
Typically, management of infrastructure has
been done in silos where each functional area
of IT (server, storage, network, etc.) had no
visibility into, or awareness of, another area.
This made troubleshooting and resolving user
issues very difficult. This is one of the reasons
75 percent of trouble tickets are initiated by
users and not the IT department. AN SDDC
enables a single point for visibility, control and
manageability.
• Improved resource utilization: Historically,
the utilization of data center infrastructure was
poor, below 30 percent in some cases. This is
because hardware was deployed in silos so
there was no ability to share infrastructure. In
an SDDC, infrastructure is deployed, virtualized
and pooled, and accessed when and as
required. This can deliver resource utilization of
over 70 percent — a marked improvement over
the current low utilization experienced by many
mainstream businesses today.
• Process automation: The largest cause of
downtime in traditional data centers is from
human error caused by repetitive but complex
tasks required to create or modify services.
SDDC automates many processes required to
run a data center, lowering human touch points,
reducing errors and allowing IT to focus on
more important, strategic initiatives.
• Path to ITaaS: The vision of ITaaS is to deliver
any IT resource to any application or service
whenever required. An SDDC is a key enabler
and a foundation for the vision of ITaaS.
The transition to a SDDC is a critical initiative for
CIOs and IT leaders today. The journey to a SDDC
requires evolving not only the compute and
application infrastructure but also the network. It’s
crucial IT organizations fully understand the role of
the network in the SDDC.
Section III: The Role of the Network in
the Software-Defined Data Center
Legacy data centers were built on a concept of best-
effort application delivery. In this case, the network
played a tactical role by connecting various IT
resources. Compute resources were given much
greater strategic value than the network.
The SDDC is a network-centric compute paradigm,
which means the network evolves from a tactical
element that connects application service resources
to a strategic one. The network is the single IT
resource that spans the entire data center and
connects various components. As the data center
evolves to an SDDC, data center resources are
virtualized and reside in general purpose pools, and
the network acts as the connectivity fabric.
In a legacy data center, a server contained compute
resources, storage, I/O, memory and other functions.
In an SDDC, these resources are interconnected via
the network, so the network takes on the role of the
backplane for a next-generation data center.
Additionally, IT resource orchestration is best served
from the network as it’s the single component that
ties all other components together and spans
multiple data centers, where these exist.
© 2013 ZK Research
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5. The Software-Defined Data Center is Key to IT-as-a-Service 5
Traditional data centers use Spanning Tree Protocol
(STP) to prevent loops and broadcast radiation by
disabling redundant ports. The disabled ports are
only made active in the event of a failure of one of
the active paths, meaning network managers need
to overbuild the network to accommodate for the
passive ports. SDDCs are built on modern,
optimized protocols, such as Shortest Path Bridging
(SPB).
This shift to network-centric computing puts the
network in a position to take on a new, more
strategic role, one that requires a higher level of
intelligence, integration and automation. The
network enablement of the SDDC means virtual
workload migrations can trigger provisioning of
storage or network resources, enabling IT to
maximize investment in virtualization technology
today, while also laying the foundation for IT to shift
to an as-a-service model.
Additionally, the network is rapidly being virtualized
through various overlay technologies using protocols
such as VXLAN. The network can seamlessly
integrate the various overlay protocols to enable the
dynamic creation of virtual wires to interconnect any
two or more service components. This provides
seamless and automated integration between the
network and other data center resources.
Lastly, the SDDC can deliver the performance
associated with dedicated infrastructure without the
high overhead, combined with the operational
flexibility and scale of software defined networks
(SDNs), all while running on commodity hardware
(Exhibit 4). This provides IT with the best attributes
of the different compute models but optimizes total
cost of ownership.
Exhibit 4: Software-Defined Data Centers are Optimized for Cost and Performance
Source: ZK Research, 2013
© 2013 ZK Research
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6. The Software-Defined Data Center is Key to IT-as-a-Service 6
Section IV: What to Look For in a
Network Solution Provider
The network requirements of a SDDC create the
need for a change in architecture and infrastructure.
IT leaders must evaluate their strategic data center
vendors carefully; particularly the network where
historically best-effort has been good enough. Today
there can be no compromise between performance,
scalability, agility, security and performance. A rock-
solid network foundation is a key to enabling an
SDDC, ushering in the era of ITaaS. Key attributes
for the network foundation are as follows:
• Built on an open standard for broad cross-
vendor interoperability: There are many ways
for solution providers to meet the challenges of
the SDDC. Many vendors will likely use
proprietary protocols and solutions to develop
new products and enable features quickly.
While this approach may have some short-term
appeal, IT leaders must think long-term and
understand that the proprietary approach can
lead to vendor lock-in and impair a customer’s
ability to choose best-of-breed products. A
standards-based solution guarantees
interoperability with other best-of-breed
products and enables the widest variety of
choice.
• OpenStack support: The solution provider
should offer a standards-based controller that
can integrate with northbound OpenStack
orchestration platforms. Integration between
OpenStack’s open middleware and data center
resources is a key enabler of the SDDC.
Likewise, the availability of a real-time,
software-definable and service-orientated
networking infrastructure, it could be argued, is
a fundamental prerequisite. The solution should
also offer southbound integration through
network APIs to maximize network agility.
• Built on a network fabric: The underlying
network supporting the SDDC should follow
fabric principles. A network fabric is a next-
generation networking solution optimized for
the growing amount of east-west traffic seen in
data centers today. A network fabric is
significantly simpler to manage and can allow
network operations to focus on more strategic
tasks.
• Low-risk deployment: The network must be
able to run alongside traditional technologies to
minimize the risk of a forklift upgrade.
Organizations should have the ability to start
small and migrate to a broader network fabric
over time.
• Multitenant network capabilities: In many
companies, policy or legislation requires the
total separation of traffic. This can be the case
where IT supports subsidiary companies or
where separate business units require isolation.
This is very common for verticals such as state
and local government, education and financial
services. The network must be a single
physical network that looks and acts like
several logical networks, each with its own
unique needs and requirements. For this to
operate efficiently, the network must
automatically separate traffic into distinct virtual
networks but have access to a common set of
data center services.
• End-to-end view of the data center: An
SDDC can create many blind spots for the
network manager. Abstraction of the logical
service from the physical layer is not something
most management platforms can handle today.
The network should provide an end-to-end view
of network flows, allowing IT to bridge the gap
between the physical and virtual worlds and
removing the blind spots from the IT
department.
© 2013 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media

7. The Software-Defined Data Center is Key to IT-as-a-Service 7
Section V: Conclusion and
Recommendations
CIOs must enable a higher degree of IT agility, while
at the same time lowering the cost of running IT and
improving application performance. This may seem
like a daunting task, but the SDDC is a game-
changing development which transforms data center
operations from highly manual processes to
automated orchestration. This is a critical step
toward migration to an ITaaS model.
An SDDC puts the network in a position to become
the key point of competitive differentiation for
organizations, as they look to capitalize on the
flexibility and cost-efficiencies of virtualization and
cloud computing. This introduces new requirements
for network design and choice of solution provider.
To realize its full potential, the network must
undergo a major shift in strategy. With this in mind,
ZK Research makes the following recommendations
for companies looking to migrate to an SDDC, and
migrating to an as-a-service model for IT:
• Choose a standards-based, open solution:
The typical data center is an ecosystem of
solution providers. A network built on
proprietary technologies may not integrate with
individual ecosystem vendors, significantly
limiting long-term choice. A standards-based,
open solution should be considered one of the
most critical decision factors for an SDDC.
• Evaluate networks vendors on next-
generation network principals: An incumbent
vendor or the market share leader may seem
like a safe and easy choice. However, the data
center is evolving rapidly and decision-makers
should choose a vendor that best supports the
SDDC and ITaaS principals, even if this means
moving away from the incumbent. The network
plays too important a role to not do the proper
due diligence and choose the vendor offering
the best choice.
• Automate processes where possible:
Automation will play a crucial role in IT’s
migration to an as-a-service model. The
creation of new services, or modification of
existing ones, should be enabled through a
centralized management console. For this to
happen, the processes required to make the
necessary infrastructure changes needs to be
automated, allowing companies to make
changes without running the risk of
unnecessary downtime.
© 2013 ZK Research: A Division of Kerravala Consulting
All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution in any form without the express prior permission of ZK Research is expressly prohibited.
For questions, comments or further information, email zeus@zkresearch.com.