This past month has been another one of those “Firehose” months. This is such an exciting time for me in my career. VMware has been treating me quite well, and I’ve been having so much fun.

My team, the Accelerate Velocity team is dedicated to promoting the full stack of Software Defined Data Center. The SDDC is the most recent iteration in an evolution of converged architectures. I remember my first experiences with converged deployments at EMC, and being so impressed by the vBlock . So well thought out and robust. Since then, a number of newer approaches have been taken toward this concept. Companies such as Simplivity, Nutanix, and of course, NetApp have evolved the concept of merging Computer/Storage/Network into one highly detailed package. These approaches have grown in both dedication to unique use-cases, and scalability.

As you may know, I previously worked with Nexenta, one of the leders in Software Defined Storage. The concept behind “Software Defined” beyond the marketecture or buzzword status is that Commodity-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) with software focused on the task at hand can be leveraged to best utilize the highest level of performance from that hardware. The key is that software makes the difference. The better the software, the better the solution.

This concept has evolved over the past couple of years to include network with spectacular growth in companies like Nicera which was acquired by VMware, and Cumulus. Again, these software applications take advantage of commodity equipment rather than necessarily the more expensive mainstays in the space while providing a software layer that’s easily as robust, and often moreso than the embedded software that comes with the native components. These can also leverage API’s and third party apps like Puppet, Salt, and Chef to automate deployment to multiple devices or even to enterprise level rollouts.

One can certainly recognize that vSphere has done much the same thing with the virtualization of operating systems within standardized x86 server class machines.

Along comes the VMware with the most impressive attempt to tie all these pieces together. This is the SDDC approach.

As we move together in this blog, I’ll discuss some of the solutions we present, deployment methodologies, recipes and various components necessary to the creation of the SDDC.