Everywhere you go these days in the information technology field, something software-defined hits you in the face.

You cannot escape it.

It is in networking, servers, storage, everywhere!

However, when asked for a succinct description of just what, exactly, software defined <insert field or product here/>, no vendor seems to be either able to do so, or have a clue!

It is a bloody mess.

It is almost as if software-defined <anything> has devolved to the days when vendors who didn’t have suitable products, ‘cloudified’ their products by attaching the moniker “cloud” either as a prefix or suffix to the names of their existing products in other to hoodwink unsuspecting end-users into buying their tired, warmed-over products.

Thankfully, the world-at-large was not fooled.

They quickly dubbed these misadventures as “cloud-washing”, a sobriquet which made the accused hasten to deliver actual cloud, or cloud-enabled products.

Which brings us to “software-defined”.

For companies with datacenters of any size, making the right choices with regards to technology trends is essential. These trends could be in performance, capacity, power and cooling, or manageability.

Therefore, the technology leader at said firms has to sort through the chaff and determine what is needed in order to not just place, but stay ahead. Or at least, abreast of the category leaders. For managed services, it is a must!

As a result, I find myself devouring all information I can find on this topic, and asking the following questions:

• What is software-defined?
• Is it an add-on I can strap to the thousands of servers we currently have?
• Would I have to perform an R&R (rip-and-replace) for our networking equipment?
• Will our storage have to live in new boxes?
• Are current management platforms and frameworks obsolete?
• Do we have to junk our newly-developed and implemented custom managed services dashboard and platform?
• What is the rôle of hardware, and indeed, hardware OEMs in this new software-defined universe?

Someone, help me here!