Software-defined everything -- from SDN and NFV to software-defined storage -- has been in use in some forms for decades. It's not as revolutionary as it seems.

Software-defined networking. Network functions virtualization. Virtual storage. These are the new buzzwords of the channel today. But are these trends actually as novel as they seem? Viewed from an historical perspective, not really.

#SDN, #NFV and scale-out storage -- which we can collectively call software-defined everything, or #SDx if you like acronyms -- offer lots of benefits for data centers and the cloud. They abstract operations from underlying infrastructure, making workloads more portable, scalable and platform-agnostic. They also create new opportunities for building more secure infrastructure. And they can lower costs by letting you get next-generation functionality out of cheap commodity hardware.

http://m.thevarguy.com/open-source-application-software-companies/are-software-defined-data-centers-really-new-idea-no