In the past year, software defined data center has become a reality, said John Gilmartin, GM and VP or the Software Defined Data Center Suite Business Unit at VMware, Inc. Now, VMware can provide its customers with what Gilmartin considers the ideal infrastructure to help their customers implement a self-service cloud within the enterprise and assist developers to become more agile and productive.

The software data center’s innovation pressure points have to do with app requirements “pushing down” on infrastructure. Cloud-native applications, Gilmartin said, need different things from infrastructure. Sitting in for an interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s roving news desk broadcasting live from VMware’s annual VMworld conference, he called out that developers are looking affordability, agility, and different tooling in particular. Enterprise IT departments have a new type of task, they are expected to be able to “spin up infrastructure” just by going to an API or website.

In fact, Gilmartin said, IT organizations are facing entirely new types of responsibilities. They’re no longer just involved in back office operations and are now considered fundamental to businesses, often integrating with marketing, sales, and product development.

Network virtualization and security

Of the different components that make up software defined data center, Gilmartin said that network virtualization is one of the most critical, a statement Wikibon.org Co-founder and CTO David Floyer validated in an earlier analyst segment on theCUBE. When VMware debuted its network virtualization tool NSX in 2013, most of the value propositions had to do with speed and agility. In the past year, though, Gilmartin observed that value propositions have shifted to micro-segmentation and bringing security inside the data center.

Whereas security used to be entirely perimeter-based, customers are now interested in bringing “security controls all the way down to the virtual machine (VM) and the application itself.” VMware wants to protect applications that are already inside the data center, but figuring out how to proceed has involved rejecting traditional models that are overly complex or expensive. Leveraging network virtualization, Gilmartin said, allows VMware to bring security inside the data center and bring the security controls to the VM. Automation, he added, is essential to making inter-perimeter security feasible from an operations perspective.

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The software defined data center can also help on the flip side, figuring out how to keep data safe as it’s disbursed and distributed. “The great thing,” Gilmartin explained, “is that when you bring security controls into software, instead of hardware, it can travel and be part of that application. As the application moves, the security follows.” The possibilities for security are hugely multiplied with software secure data center, said Gilmartin.

Business cases for virtualized data center

Rapidity of adoption is dependent on businesses cases — the more useful technology is to a business, the more likely said business will be to embrace it. In conversation with Gilmartin on theCUBE, host Dave Vellante asked if the VMware GM and VP could shed some light on the business case of the software defined data center in comparison to VMware’s “Phase One,” of virtualize and compute.

Gilmartin explained that the software defined data center allows developers to move faster, reduce cycle times, increase speed, and drive revenue. On the back-end, it reduces operating expenses. Specifically, he called out the example of Virtual SAN, which uses a different operating model to deploy storage or virtual machines. “It’s application-centric and VM-centric,” he said, which frees administrators from managing infrastructure and refocuses them on managing applications.

By virtualizing the network and storage, Gilmartin said, a VMware customer can get up to 35 – 49 percent reduction in the capital expense of building a data center. Virtualization has certainly become more complicated, he observed, but still offers substantial cost-reduction benefits.

In comparison to Microsoft, Gilmartin highlighted that VMware sees itself as a leader in server virtualization. Building off server virtualization, Gilmartin described network virtualization and software defined data center as a differentiated set of capabilities that allow VMware customers to “extend the data center in unique ways.”

The importance of automation

Speaking about automation, which is essential to the software defined data center, Gilmartin commented that it frees administrators from manual activities by running them in software. VMware customers can move at the speed of business, not the underlying hardware.

When to choose the hybrid cloud

While sometimes it makes sense for companies to rent space, Gilmartin explained, often the economics work in favor of owning assets and building upon them. Gilmartin added that hybrid cloud gives customers the flexibility to explore which use cases work best on public or private cloud. The trick, he added, is offering these options as seamlessly as possible.

Defining hyperconversion

Explaining that hyperconversion is “the coming together of per scripting hardware definition with software that’s pre-installed and tightly integrated,” Gilmartin said that it means a VMware customer can be up and running in a quarter of an hour. Hyperconversion, at its core, is about deploying virtual machines quickly and begin able to expand in a building-block fashion.

Gilmartin decried the work VMware is doing with OpenStack as a particularly exciting avenue his company is pursing. “We’re really looking to bring these types of open APIs, vendor-neutral APIs, onto of the software defined platform.”

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