The 5 Pillars for Building a Smart Datacenter: #3 Software-Defined Power

Intro

Welcome to the third (of five) eBook of the series: The 5 pillars to Build a Smart Datacenter. What makes a datacenter “smart”? Is it a well-planned consumption of electricity? Or is it a wise use of the resources? Is it just software or does hardware play an important role as well? In these five Submer eBooks, we will describe the strategic, practical and economic pillars that you should take in consideration if you want to make your datacenter smarter and more sustainable. The five ebooks will focus on:

1. PUE, DCiE and WUE
2. Power Density and Space Efficiency
3. Software Defined Power
4. Resources and Energy Consumption
5. Costs

In this third ebook, we will analyze a “marketing term” that has entered the IT lexicon: Software-Defined Power.

1. “Software-Defined”

“Software-defined” is a relatively new term. It was introduced in 2011, and you may have seen it in contexts such as “software-defined datacenter” or “software-defined network”.

Even though the term has entered the IT lexicon, it seems that the origins of this concept are rooted in Marketing: “Software-defined data center (SDDC; also: virtual data center, VDC) is a marketing term that extends virtualization concepts such as abstraction, pooling, and automation to all data center resources and services to achieve IT as a service (ITaaS). In a software-defined data center, ‘all elements of the infrastructure — networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service.”

“In a software-defined data center, ‘all elements of the infrastructure — networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service.

A software-defined architecture allows a datacenter to manage in a more flexible and easier way its data flow. If you consider the “data toll” that the digital transformation is imposing on the current datacenter infrastructure (think about IoT, Edge or , to name a few trends that would be almost impossible to build, without software-defined networking technologies), you’d probably grasp the importance of having in place a strategy that helps you cooperate with that in a smarter and more efficient way.