SDDC And The Elephant In the Room by Chuck Hollis.
From the post:
Like many companies, we at EMC start our new year with a leadership gathering. We gather to celebrate, connect, strategize and share. They are *always* great events.
I found this year’s gathering was particularly rewarding in terms of deep content. The majority of the meeting was spent unpacking the depth behind the core elements of EMC’s strategy: cloud, big data and trust.
We dove in from a product and technology perspective. We came at it from a services view. Another take from a services and skills viewpoint. And, finally, the organizational and business model implications.
For me, it was like a wonderful meal that just went on and on. Rich, detailed and exceptionally well-thought out — although your head started to hurt after a while.
Underlying much of the discussion was the central notion of a software-defined datacenter (SDDC for short), representing the next generation of infrastructure and operational models. All through the discussion, that was clearly the conceptual foundation for so much of what needed to happen in the industry.
And I started to realize we still have a lot of explaining to do: not only around the concepts themselves, but what they mean to IT groups and the organizations they support.
I’ve now had some time to think and digest, and I wanted to add a few different perspectives to the mix.
The potential of software-defined datacenters (SDDC) comes across loud and clear in Chuck’s post. Particularly for ad-hoc integration of data sources for new purposes.
But then I remembered, silos aren’t built by software. Silos are build by users and software is just a means for building a silo.
Silos won’t become less frequent because of software-defined datacenters, unless users stop building silos.
There will be a potential for fewer silos and more pressure on users to build fewer silos, maybe, but that is no guarantee of fewer silos.
Even a subject-defined datacenter (SubDDC) cannot guarantee no silos.
A SubDDC that defines subjects in its data, structures and software offers a chance to move across silo barriers.
How much of a chance depends on its creator and the return from crossing across silo barriers.