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Many companies trying to take advantage of cloud computing are embracing the moniker of the “Software Defined Data Center” as one way to understand and communicate the benefits of moving towards an infrastructure resource utility model. VMware has taken on the term SDDC to mean doing everything in your data center with software and not requiring any custom hardware. Other companies sell “software-defined” products which do require particular hardware for various reasons but the functionality can be programmatically controlled and requested all in software. Whether your definition of “software-defined” mandates hardware or not the general premise (nothing to do with premises!) is being able to deliver and scale IT resources programmatically.

This is great but I think SDDC is just a stepping stone to what we are really trying to achieve which is the “Policy Defined Data Center”.

Once you can deliver IT resources in software, the next step is ensuring those IT resources are following your business rules and processes, what you would probably call business intelligence policy enforcement. These are the things that your business asks of IT partly for regulatory reasons like data retention and storing credit cards securely but also encompasses a huge amount of what you do in IT.

Here are a few examples of what kinds of policies may you have:

• Users need to change their passwords every 30 days.
• Local admin access to servers is strictly controlled by AD groups.
• Developers cannot have access to production systems.
• You can only RDP to servers over a management connection.
• Critical services need to be replicated to a DR site, some synchronously, others not.
• Production servers need to get priority over test and development servers.
• Web server connections need to be secured with SSL.
• SQL Server storage needs to have higher priority over say print servers.
• Oracle VMs need to run on particular hosts for licensing considerations.
• Load balanced web servers need to sit in different blade chassis in different racks.
• Your trading application needs to have maximum x latency and minimum y IOPS
• Your widget application needs to be recoverable within an hour and no be more than 2 hours out of date.
• Your credit card database storage needs to be encrypted
• All production servers need to be backed up, some need to be kept for 7 years.

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HP has announced a new product to manage HP BladeSystem and ProLiant G7/Gen 8 infrastructure called HP OneView which is due to be released in October.

HP thinks the existing way of deploying and managing servers is built on models from 20 years ago and is in need of an update. This is certainly true particularly with HP servers despite HP having a number of tools such as HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM), HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM), HP Insight Control and HP Intelligent Provisioning.

HP OneView has been built from the ground up to simplify and speed up the server deployment and management process for servers, networking and storage. OneView runs as a self contained virtual appliance and you connect via a web browser.

HP says the user interface is a “consumer-inspired user experience” built on a “software-defined architecture” with an “open extensible platform”. HP says it has been four years in the making and has been built with the input of more than 150 of HPs biggest customers.

OneView will be a licensed product per physical server it manages starting at about £571 for a single license including three years support and updates. There will be an upgrade available from iLO Advanced, Insight Control and VCEM.

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