SDDC is currently more of a concept than a commonly implemented practice, but it has seen incremental adoption by cloud service providers and data-center-as-a-service providers. The list includes Amazon, Google and the Open Compute Project.

Components of an SDDC

Virtualization is central to the software-defined data center. There are three major SDDC building blocks:

• Network virtualization combines network resources by splitting the available bandwidth into independent channels that can each be assigned -- or reassigned -- to a particular server or device in real time.
• Storage virtualization pools physical storage from multiple network storage devices into what appears to be a single storage device managed from a central console.
• Server virtualization masks server resources, including the number and identity of individual physical servers, processors and operating systems (OSes), from server users. The intention is to spare users from managing complicated server-resource details. It also increases resource sharing and utilization, while maintaining the ability to expand capacity at a later date.