What's your Data center strategy? Revisit and get ready for the future.

Think of days before printing machines and photo copier were invented. To circulate a book to 1000 people, literally 1000 copies has to be written by hand.

Today, just write it once and photo copier will do the job for you. Additionally, if all the content is digitized, one can edit, copy, delete or restore the content with ease.

In a traditional data center, most of the tasks demands access to the hardware physically to accomplish tasks such as provisioning, configuration and management. It becomes scarier when you have proprietary hardware from multiple vendors.

How about redirecting all the intelligence from hardware to software? The result is your data center is now Software Defined or CODIFIED. You can have "Infrastructure as Code". This is similar to digitizing hard copy of a book. For eg: Each of the infra items such as server, storage, firewall, load balancer, router, switch etc., is a block of code.

The software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture enables a fully automated, zero-downtime infrastructure for any application, and any hardware, now and in the future.

Imagine what you can do with it !!

Every IT team, has their data center architecture diagram. With Software Defined Data Center, such a diagram can be converted in to a block of code and provision it without touching your hardware. Can I call it Zero Touch Provisioning or Zero Touch Deployment?

Also you can edit, clone, delete, backup or restore your complete Data center because all of it is a piece of code.

Think of use cases:

• Data Center migration, Hardware refresh, Disaster recovery site, Public cloud migration, Hybrid cloud adoption. All of these are as easy as taking a photo copy.
• Give a self-service catalog to your users/ developers/ DevOps teams. They can drag and drop individual infra items on a design canvas, connect them and build their own infrastructure. Magic happens when click deploy and infra is ready. No more infra request tickets from your developers.

All of this is NOT just an idea or vision. You can have a complete Software Defined Data Center with automation capabilities today.

How does this sound? Maybe, it's time to Re-think of your organisation's IT strategy.

VMware's vision is to deploy any type of application (client-server, VM, container, micro-services, serverless/ functions) on any cloud (public, private or hybrid) and deliver it to any device (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, etc) with enterprise grade security.