Software defined what???

Historically there is silos of information: Compute, Network, and Storage.
Each had their own stack of technology to manage and teams to handshake for them to inter-operate.

Frankly, this is still the case in most medium and large business organizations.
There will be a reliance on obsolete hardware and software in small shops where you have a single IT guy wearing multiple hats for the foreseeable future. A new type of consultant will become mainstream though called the cloud admin. They can start out in the public cloud and then bring that same technology in house for economy of scale for a private cloud. They know how to create an abstraction layer between the hardware and software.

Cloud technology and starting with server (compute) virtualization there is major shifts happening in the IT industry. Cloud technology is in constant flux and therefore there are many different opinions of an exact definition of "Cloud." According to my definition (that has a Dell bias), it is using software on top of industry standard hardware to disaggregate the physical control plane from the data plane.

Most IT shops have done exactly this with virutalizing some or most of their servers to best optimize use the hardware and provide quick application recovery or migration. Web scale data centers are doing this with not only the server virtualization but also the storage and networking pieces as well.

On the storage side of things we are not managing the spindles anymore, we are managing the bits of data. The software managing the spindles can allow RAID 10 writes and RAID 5 reads on the same spindle. However it goes even further with hyper-converged solutions (openstack or nutanix) where the all the compute and storage can fit on any node within the datacenter.

The best description I have received for these sever node environments is that we need to stop treating servers as puppies and instead treat them like cattle. You cannot spend hours setting up the server just right, you know treating it like a puppy. You need software that automates the provisioning of the hardware to a few minutes and shoving as much hardware into a confined space, you know like corralling cattle for a stockyard.

The last piece I would like to write about is the software defined networking. Again using software to disaggregate the control plane from the data (forwarding) plane on industry standard hardware. There is three different paths to currently do this. First is with open source operating systems running on the switch that allows Linux automation tools to setup the hardware. Second is overlay solution that plugs into the management center of a hypervisor environment. Third would be a control plane solution requiring either a virutal or hardware controller that is the central brain of the entire fabric. All this choice is causing confusion since there is so many choices to make. Also the solutions are innovating at break neck speeds.

However isn't that the better business problem to have versus being stuck with a single vendor's hardware box as the only choice for deployment and innovation?