Software-defined data center

Software-defined data center (SDDC) (also: virtual data center (VDC)) is a marketing term that extends virtualization concepts such as abstraction, pooling, and automation to all data center resources and services to achieve IT as a service (ITaaS). In a software-defined data center, "all elements of the infrastructure — networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service." While ITaaS may represent an outcome of SDDC, SDDC is differently cast toward integrators and datacenter builders rather than toward tenants. Software awareness in the infrastructure is not visible to tenants.

SDDC support can be claimed by a wide variety of approaches. Critics see the software-defined data center as a marketing tool and “software-defined hype”, noting this variability.

In 2013, an analyst projected that at least some software-defined data center components would experience market growth. The software-defined networking market is expected to be valued at about USD $3.7 billion by 2016, compared to USD $360 million in 2013.IDC estimates that the software-defined storage market is poised to expand faster than any other storage market.

The software-defined data center encompasses a variety of concepts and data-center infrastructure components, with each component potentially , operated, and managed through an application programming interface (API). Core architectural components that comprise the software-defined data center include the following:

A software-defined data center differs from a private cloud, since a private cloud only has to offer virtual-machine self-service, beneath which it could use traditional provisioning and management. Instead, SDDC concepts imagine a data center that can encompass private, public, and hybrid clouds.

Data centers traditionally lacked the capacity to accommodate total virtualization.

By 2013, companies began laying the foundation for software-defined data centers with virtualization. Ben Cherian of Midokura considers Amazon Web Services as a catalyst for the move toward software-defined data centers because it

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