Extended Feature Article:

The software defined data centre may be the promised land for providers struggling to deliver cloud services cost effectively at scale, but remains in the early stage of development.

Imagine a data centre uncluttered by legacy, dedicated network, server and storage hardware consolidated to the point where every application, service or process which can be delivered as a virtualised software function has been moved onto next generation architecture.

The concept of the software defined data centre (SDDC) has been with us for a few years now, but it is only recently that the network virtualisation platforms needed to make it happen have matured to point where real time deployments become possible.