Additional possibilities and opportunities
All the previews mentioned topics serve the sole goal to install and use the SDDC within your data center. However, once you have the SDDC running the real fun begins since you can start to introduce additional functionalities impossible for any traditional data center. Let's just briefly touch on some of the possibilities from an IT view.
The self-healing data center
This is a concept where the automatic deployment of services is connected to a monitoring system. Once the monitoring system detects that a service or environment may be facing constraints, it can automatically trigger an additional deployment for this service to increase the throughput.
While this is application dependent, for infrastructure services this can become quite handy. Think of ESXi host auto deployments if compute power is becoming a constraint, or data store deployments if disk space is running low. If this automation is acting too aggressive for your organization, it can be used with an approval function. Once the monitoring detects a shortcoming it will ask for approval to fix it with a deployment action.
Instead of getting an e-mail from your monitoring system that there is a constraint identified, you get an e-mail with the constraint and the resolving action. All you need to do is to approve the action.
The self-scaling data center
A similar principle is to use a capacity management tool to predict the growth of your environment. If it approaches a trigger, the system can automatically generate an order letter, containing all needed components to satisfy the growing capacity demands.
This can then be sent to finance or the purchasing management for approval and before you even get into any capacity constraints, the new gear might be available and ready to run. However, consider the regular turnaround time for ordering hardware, which might affect how far in the future you have to set the trigger for such functionality.
Both of this opportunities are more than just nice to haves, they enable your data center to be truly flexible and proactive. Due to the fact that an SDDC is offering a high amount of agility, it will also need some self-monitoring to stay flexible and usable and to fulfill unpredictable demand.
