What is a software-defined data center?

Virtualization, automation, and the use of infrastructure as a service (IaSS) has led to the new data center standard: the software-defined data center (SDDC), in which software becomes the focus over hardware. While software plays the key role in SDDCs, hardware is still required. Most hardware in SDDCs looks quite different from hardware in traditional environments (HP, IBM, EMC, and Dell, among others). Whereas legacy data centers have lots of proprietary hardware to manage myriad devices, an SDDC uses mostly commodity hardware (available from traditional vendors like Dell and HPE, or from other players like Super Micro and Quanta, among others). With SDDCs, a company can operate a data center with fewer people. The reason is simple, SDDCs eliminate traditional resource islands in favor of the new software-powered matrix that makes the software layer responsible for everything.