By Kurt Marko, Contributor VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger used his Interop keynote to lay out a four-pronged strategy for building what the company has coined the software defined data center, adding details and customer testimonials to a concept he initially described last year. Besides the firm’s ubiquitous server virtualization products, which abstract compute resources into customizable chunks that can be reconfigured and reallocated as needed to suit specific application needs, the strategy includes virtual networks, using NSX technology released last fall, storage virtualization provided by the recently shipping and Interop award-winning VSAN product and software to centrally and programmatically automate configuration, deployment and deployment of the entire infrastructure stack.
It’s an expansive vision that could put VMware in the middle of enterprise IT application and service design, construction and delivery. Indeed, if fully adopted by VMware’s customers, which includes well over half of all organizations according to both an InformationWeek virtualization report and Opsview survey,, it would make VMware the hub around which all business application and IT infrastructure decisions revolve. Meaning that in an era of cloud computing and software as a service, the SDDC could do for VMware what the Windows family of PC and server software did for Microsoft in the age of client-server computing.