Wharfedale Technologies
Taking the Next Big Step with Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

Enterprise customers are tasked every day to find ways to improve their business agility and speed of innovation, increase their service quality to both internal and external customers, improve their business continuity and minimize downtime, and ultimately drive down their total cost of ownership for instance, both CapEx and OpEx.

Wharfedale Technologies (WFT Cloud) a technology consulting firm specializing in SAP infrastructure integrations and services, as well as Private, Virtual-private and hybrid Cloud solutions, strongly believes this can be achieved by leveraging solutions that provide standardization, virtualization, orchestration, and most importantly automation. Automation will be a key factor to help achieve lower operating costs, increased productivity (agility), higher availability and reliability (quality), and better performance (speed).

The Next Big Thing - SDDC (Software Defined Data Center)

The major forces driving enterprise customers are the innovations in processing power and memory, high demand for resource pooling, and manual/custom network configurations. Enterprise customers that are already running solutions in a virtualized environment, or are in the process of virtualization are looking forward to gaining a better competitive advantage within their data center, by extending intelligent and integrated management platforms through SDDC for better automation.

“Technologies like SDDC will provide tangible business benefits for enterprise customers with improved agility and reduced operational costs,” says Ganesh Radhakrishnan, CEO of WFT.

EMC and VMware provide key products that enable abstraction, pooling and allow provisioning of resources as a set of services. These features combined with automation make SDDC a reality for customers. The Princeton, NJ based WFT Cloud is executing proof of concept projects involving network virtualization products like NSX and software defined storage products like EMC ViPR.

The goal is to integrate these products with compute virtualization and VMware’s management and orchestration products like vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) to achieve a true Software Define Data Center.

To manage SAP in a SDDC framework, tools like SAP LVM (Landscape Virtualization Manager) play a vital role. Integration of LVM with vCAC will provide the management interface for business users.The recent announcement of vHANA (for running SAP HANA Production landscape on a virtualized environment) aligns with overall SDDC framework.

The Roadmap for SDDC

WFT, a pioneer for SAP infrastructure delivery for decades, strongly believes that SDDC concept will enable customers to benefit from a higher level of automation for their enterprise landscapes, including those with applications from SAP and other vendors.

WFT Cloud, being the first SAP-certified Cloud Services partner, is actively working towards migrating existing data center to SDDC for enterprise landscapes. WFT Cloud implemented server virtualization seven years ago to reap the benefits of consolidation.The next phase in the roadmap for SDDC was network virtualization, which was achieved with implementation of Software Defined Networking, which currently provides the core routing, VPN and firewall functionalities for the instances of SAP software in WFT Cloud.The next logical step is storage virtualization, which is currently in the process of being rolled out. WFT Cloud gained valuable experience in deploying this architecture internally for SAP solution landscapes and intends to use this knowledge to solve customer’s business problems and provide automated service provisioning capabilities.This transition provides greater value, flexibility and efficiency as compared to existing data center architecture. SDDC is the future of the data center model.