Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/661564
In a recent survey of data center decision makers conducted by vXchnge, more than 90% of respondents believe software will define the data center of the future. Furthermore, 77% plan to make the move to a software-defined data center (or SDDC) within the next five years. By John m. haWkins the Software-Defined Data Center: a Smarter Way r espondents to this survey indicate that a soware- defined data center is the direction forward, but I wonder whether they really know what it means to have a soware-defined data center. By analyz- ing some other data points, we can draw a few conclusions and paint a slightly bet- ter picture of decision makers' needs and perhaps provide some insight into what the SDDC landscape might look like in the future. at the eDge e data suggests that the soware- defined data center will need edge capabilities—this conclusion is based on a large majority (81%) who indicated that they felt that having their customers in close proximity to their data was "very" or "extremely" important. Hence, the more devices and content that's devel- oped on this Earth, the greater the need to provide a means to have data in close proximity to the consumer. muLtisite aWare e SDDC should also have the ability to manage multiple sites, a notion backed by 56% of respondents who indi- cated that they have more than five data centers. e soware-defined data center might just need to be market aware, meaning that a data center is aware of the market (location) in which it resides. Take for instance the Philadelphia mar- ket: a company with data in Philadelphia would probably want its SDDC to be THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 27 www.datacenterjournal.com