If you ever wanted to take a stroll through the computing industry’s past, it’s not necessary to go all the way to Mountain View, Calif., to visit the Computer History Museum. Just step inside a data center. “A data center looks a lot like a museum of past IT decisions,” said Steve Herrod, CTO and SVP of research and development at VMware, at GigaOM’s Structure 2012conference Wednesday. Data centers are full of the dedicated hardware allocated for specific applications. Traditionally as new applications are conceived new hardware implementations are developed to power them, Herrod said. Software-defined networking (SDN), however, will create an application agnostic framework, he said, giving IT managers the ability to repurpose their infrastructure over and over. “Software-defined networking will allow us to have the elasticity and malleability to move these things around,” he said.
