The SDBB (Software Defined Bla Bla)
Last week i was in San Francisco for VMworld 2013. Loved the show, and most of all loved meeting all my friends VMware Community.
During VMworld, and in the months prior for the event the buzzword seems to be Software Defined (Everything). And although I think highly of innovative and perfectly developed software, hardware is still the driver behind the software force. Without hardware, there would be no software, and because of the innovations at the hardware level, software is able to do it’s awesomeness these days. So naming it software defined is a bit stupid IMHO!
As said, I think highly of great software. But when you think of it lots of the software houses that developed software for many years just used the innovation of hardware in a boring way. Using the extra resources the hardware would (or could) offer is what a lot of these software houses did instead of doing the same innovation in their software. as the hardware vendors did. It made developers lazy. So a revolution in Software development is needed, but giving all credits to software isn’t.
With virtualization of the X86 hardware (with VMware as the main driver behind this force) the hardware vendors (Like Intel and AMD) developed more and more cool features on the hardware side that can be leveraged by software. After server virtualization we started virtualizing the storage and now we start virtualizing the network. This are all awesome achievements and I hope to see much more on these great technologies.
Did a server (before Software Defined) do anything without software installed on it? Or a switch or router? Have you ever seen a NAS or a SAN perform without software? So why does it now all of a sudden has to be named software defined? Hardware needs Software, as Software needs Hardware, so let’s rename it to something both of these awesome technologies are equally represented 😉
Lots of questions. Do I have the answers? not really, but I guess the most of the renaming and rebranding has to do with Marketing. Renaming and creating buzzwords sells. So doing renamed technologies that already existed is all about making decision makers drool, and buy the new software (and hardware) products. It’s all about selling, and the developers just keep on creating the awesome software they are creating as well as the hardware vendors will keep on creating incredible cool hardware.
