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Software-Defined Data Centers: Seeing Through the Hype
Nerval's Lobster writes "In case you didn't catch it yesterday, AllThingsD ran a piece endorsing the idea of the software-defined data center. That's a venue where hordes of non-technical mid- and upper-level managers will see it and (because of the credibility of AllThingsD) will believe software-defined data centers are not only possible, but that they exist and that your company is somehow falling behind because you personally have not sketched up a topology on a napkin or brought a package of it to install. If mid-level managers in your datacenter or extended IT department have not been pinged at least once today by business-unit managers offering to tip them off to the benefits of software-defined data centers—or demand that they buy one—then someone should go check the internal phone system because not all the calls are coming through. Why was AllThingD's piece problematic? First, because it's a good enough publication to explain all the relevant technology terms in ways that even a non-technical audience can understand. Second, it's also a credible source, owned by Dow Jones & Co. and spun off by The Wall Street Journal. Third, software-defined data centers are genuinely happening—but it's in the very early stages. The true benefits of the platform won't arrive for quite some time—and there's too much to do in the meantime to talk about potential endpoints. Fortunately, there are a number of resources online to help tell hype from reality."
We're no longer constrained by the need to have deep specialized knowledge in the low-level components to get basic access to this technology.
That's what it is really about. The unit of computational resource is a standardized, empty server. It's not "maintained", it's wiped and reloaded. If something goes wrong with it, its load is sent elsewhere, and eventually the unit will be replaced by someone who unplugs it and plugs in another one. Nobody in the data center really has to have much of an idea of what's going on with the computers. Their concerns are power, cooling, cabling, and physical security.
Most of them will be paid at security-guard levels.
It's as if there's something genetic in MBA types that makes them abuse English so awfully as this summary exemplifies.
It's a good thing that tomorrow is Bloomsday.
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BMO
the other day I saw a summary that was not even a complete sentence, now today I see one that could have had all the words above the third point removed and it would not have made any difference because its just some asshat getting on the whine train about management.
somewhere there is a middle, maybe one decade slashdot can consistently hit it!
The article on robot controlled data centers received warm reception. This article seems more critical. It simply explains what Amazon is already doing, automation through programmed check boxes.
I'm not talking about some goofy VB controlled hack either. When you automate something, you better have a good understanding of the process. Pushing your labor off to users with credit cards willing to pay for the privilege has been the business model for quite some time.
Would it be out-of-date to call it a Virtual Cloud?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I think they already did. From TFA:
60% of the time, it works every time.
Except that the term "software defined" is not itself defined except by whatever marketing department wants to make it fit their product.
And the term will eventually be replaced with another marketing term.
Just as SaaS replaced ASP.
Just as ASP replaced thin-client.
Which means that you'll only have the access and granularity that the API gives you.
And somewhere, someone will have to deal with the real servers and switches and such. And to him, you'll just be another account in a bunch of accounts. Sure, they'll deduct the cost of your downtime from your next bill. Well, the cost of what you pay them per business hour per business day.
Don't like it? Just try to get your data from them so that you can move it to a different provider.
And each provider will be under the same pressures to reduce costs as much as possible in order to maximize their profits.
https://www.coursera.org/course/sdn
Another senseless buzz-defined buzz phrase.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Really, pointing to an article which (repeatedly) says the acronym for Software Defined Data Center is "SDDN?" That refers to Software Defined Data Network. The latter isn't limited to data centers, although that's where the most clear benefit lies. SDDN is just a single part of SDDC, which also make use of virtualization of compute and storage resources.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
USA-Rent-a-cop mini wage and BYOG.
Yes there was a data center that posted a job for security guards after they got robed and they where paying min wage and having your gun was a big plus.
That is because stuff like AWS is has been missing important pieces. You would not believe the effort I have had to go through to find some sort of active-active database solution in AWS so that I do not have to worry about a node failing and having to have someone mess around with failover to get it running again.
However, as I speak, solutions are popping up for the things that are missing. It's my impression that right now, with the right third party vendors who are direct connected with AWS, you can run just about anything you want. Enterprise or not.
There are a lot of potholes you still have to worry about, but right now, unless you think you need your own and/or specialized hardware for some reason, you can run just about anything you want in AWS. The last thing I need to get operating in AWS is Oracle RAC, which is a gigantic pain in the ass. A year or two ago, it just wouldn't work because I needed to rely on EBS, and you couldn't even configure second interfaces on your Linux hosts. Now, you can get iSCSI, NFSv4 storage from a third party vendor and you can create extra interfaces to do your heartbeat stuff.
I don't think datacenters are going away, and Linux skills certainly aren't, because we still have to admin Linux in EC2, but I think co-location of small to mid-sized companies might take a dive. This stuff is ten times better than having to run a datacenter yourself unless you have a specific need.
As systems become more inter-connected and more dependent on standard components, they also become more difficult to diagnose. Problems in one seemingly benign part of the system can affect it and render it unusable, and now those parts may be spread around virtual datacenters and servers. We need OS guru's now more than ever, but it's also expected that those guru's know many different technologies (hence, DevOps and other automation-oriented skills). It's the corollary to what's happening in development: one developer can build more software faster than ever before, but they must also be knowledgeable in a wider range of technologies.
I'm going to make me a software defined sandwich get in my software defined car and drive myself to my software defined work where I fix software designed problems (well the last part is at least technically true)
But seriously is this the new synergy? The latest buzzword craze? When did doing some fancy programming suddenly mean we had to slap the word software-defined on everything?
I should pre-emptively go out and patent the process of doing anything "in software", because "on a computer" was sooo 2012.
YetAnotherAbstractionLayer
There's already a lot of people who know puppet or chef but not much else (and think they know something). I think the trend is going to continue, ultimately spreading to the distro's themselves as they become less malleable, less flexible, with fewer differences between them (Hi Lennart). We'll have frameworks for frameworks. Linux will be Windows.
And then the trend will reverse. The current crop of 20-somethings will be in their 30's and "reinventing Unix".
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
"More than an actual technology, SDDN is the culmination of many other efforts at abstracting, consolidating, managing, provisioning, load balancing and distributing datacenter assets." Which is a fancy way of saying it's a bunch of commodity PCs running Xen, attached to some f***ing big Juniper QFabric switch with some PHP scripts to let middle-managers bring up servers without knowing where they are. It's just that right now our stage in the hype cycle is the Peak of Inflated Expectations.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
You can, but do you want to? My experience is that cloud computing, especially EC2 is quite expensive. The only benefit you get is elasticity (the E in EC2), that is you can react to radical load changes. But most enterprise applications have very predicable use patterns and are mostly flat (9-5 Mo-Fr). In almost all cases having your own servers is the cheaper solution and WAY simpler to deploy. (If you are paranoid you may still use virtual machines are servers for quit failover.)
FTFY:
The TFS I read, pretty clearly warns that the PHBs are about to be inundated with convincing but misleading information about an old technology.
The technology is nothing new as mentioned and disagreed in the AllThingD article "We’ve been doing this since the 80s.". The new thing is the business model of operating a data center, rending out the hardware and combine it with visualization and automation software. But if you already have a data center you are and if you don't you should be using some form of automated provisioning.
The only real change I have seen in the space is that (visualized) hardware is not rented by the hour instead of a 12 month contract. But that is not what either articles are about... Nothing new under the sun.
Has the author actually seen Fantasia? Mickey's attempt to control the brooms turned out to be a disaster. I imagine the software-defined data center as being a boon for consultants (the Sorcerer?) who come in and clean up the ensuing mess that the Corporate Mickeys create.
One suspects that the software defined data center is going to have so many knobs and levers that nobody will be able to effectively control it all. Maybe not even the Sorcerers. Touch one knob and affect -- quite probably adversely -- a half dozen other knobs and levers.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M