The event was put on by Stephen Foskett and the Tech Field Day (http://techfieldday.com/) crew. We heard from a ton of speakers, but the one thing I want to point out in this article is a question one of the audience members brought up to the Architecture in the SDDC Discussion Panel.
He wondered if all of this SDDC talk and scalability really is necessary for most companies. After all we’re not all Facebook or Google. We don’t all need multi-tenancy or even much scalability. It was towards the end of the panel, but I think they missed a real opportunity to make a point. Though when we chat about such things it because this big Enterprise sized monster in the room. That’s just not true, though. SDX (Software Defined Anything) will affect all of us and if you’re not on board you should probably just get out of the way.
SDDC will allow our IT departments to allow their users faster time to market, faster time to fixing trouble tickets, and the ability to improve the IT data center in a way they never have before. This won’t be a cookie cutter operation for everyone company. However, each company will need to decide what’s good for them. If it’s a small company or startup, why not just put everything in the cloud. Use Amazon or Azure. You don’t have an email admin, so why not let someone else handle that?
Perhaps you can’t go to the cloud for compliance reasons. All the more reason to have multi-tenancy and high availability available. Automate as much as possible. Create multi-tenant environments so users can only access what you’ve allocated to them. This is not always a multi-million dollar endeavor as you can do a lot of this with open source solutions.
For larger SMBs or Enterprises you want application portability. You may want some of your applications to lie on-premises and some in the cloud. Either way, you want to be able to move the application, automatically to the best place possible for performance and uptime. I would encourage all IT folks to pay attention to the SDDC evolution. If you’re someone who thinks it doesn’t apply to you, you may end up getting left in the dust.