[1] In a software-defined data center, "all elements of the infrastructure — networking, storage, CPU and security – are virtualized and delivered as a service.
[3] In 2013, analysts were divided into three different groups,[3] those who think it is "just another software-defined hype", those who think most of the components are already available and those who see a potential future market.
[5] Core architectural components that comprise the software-defined data center[6] include the following: A software-defined data center differs from a private cloud, since a private cloud only has to offer virtual-machine self-service,[9] beneath which it could use traditional provisioning and management.
Instead, SDDC concepts imagine a data center that can encompass private, public, and hybrid clouds.
[3] Ben Cherian of Midokura considered Amazon Web Services as a catalyst for the move toward software-defined data centers because it "convinced the world that the data center could be abstracted into much smaller units and could be treated as disposable pieces of technology, which in turn could be priced as a utility.
[3] According to some observers, software-defined data centers won’t necessarily eliminate challenges that relate to handling the differences between development and production environments; managing a mix of legacy and new applications; or delivering service-level agreements (SLAs).