What is a software-defined data center, and why is it the next step in the evolving concept of a data center? David Shacochis (pictured, left), vice president of product management at CenturyLink Inc., and Jim Aluotto (pictured, right), director of service provider business, Americas region, at VMware Inc., explained in depth what an SDDC is and what the future holds for data centers as they partner together to see these innovations enfold.

“Piecing together a private cloud solution used to mean talking to a number of different technology stacks, a number of different API frameworks,” Shacochis said. “And so software-defined data center … means just a simplified view of being able to automate all that together, have it all orchestrated, and have it be one common stack. ”

Shacochis and Aluotto spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed SDDCs and the history of the partnership between CenturyLink and VMware. (* Disclosure below.)

Partnering to make a software-defined data center

Aluotto expounded on SDDCs: “In its most simplistic form, [SDDCs] is spinning up end-to-end complete automation across compute, network, and storage assets,” he said. VMware is stitching it all together and creating a complete, automated encapsulated virtualized data center. “It drives efficiencies in the data center, but it also drives efficiencies and opportunities around the way you operate it,” he added.

CenturyLink and VMware are partnering to build out CenturyLink’s next-gen managed private cloud offering, which has accelerated CenturyLink’s time to market. “There’s a lot of interoperability in that,” Shacochis said. “There’s a lot we’re able to do around hybrid applications, because something you deploy to VMware inside [VMware Cloud Foundation] is very similar to something you deploy in your own home-grown environment … where there’s just a very clean migration and upgrade path with that interoperability.”

VMware has teamed up with CenturyLink because it’s really all about the market opportunity, according to Aluotto. “The market opportunity that we bring to the table for somebody like CenturyLink is quite extensive, let alone all the benefits that the mutual customer gets,” Aluotto said. “They get to protect their data center, their data and application assets. All the reliability, compatibility, security that they would expect from their own VMware infrastructure, they would expect from a VMware cloud provider like CenturyLink.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: CenturyLink Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CenturyLink nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE