'Software-defined anything' is NONSENSE. Don't bother pitching it

I like sales people and marketeers; they are often nice, genuine and good people… mostly. But I’ve got a new service to offer. If you think that you’ve invented a new product sector, a new market or a new concept, email me and we’ll arrange a call. If you can convince me that you’ve invented a completely new concept the call …

[silent_count]

But.. but.. my indisputable projections (ok, fine... they may have been slightly fabricated) clearly show that the market for software-defined advertising drivel is going to provide a paradigm-shifting explosion of end-point synergies of unparalleled holistic social integration.

Yeah, sorry. I've been watching The Wolf of Wall Street and it's rubbed off on me, and not in a good way. So, about that Amazon wish list --->

[Dave, Portsmouth]

Reg budget cuts?

Dear reg, you've either been hacked by a bored teenager (I hope), or you need to pay your writers more!

[Eddy Ito]

I don't know, I've always thought the meaning-defined-word was quite useful.

[Teoh Han Hui]

Like how "software-defined radio" is rubbish? What a joke this piece of writing (if you can call it that) is.

[jake]

Marketing twadle is marketing twadle.

I'm surprised that ElReg allowed this article ... It's going to totally piss off the advertisers, but it is absolutely accurate.

AAAS (anything as a service) is complete bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Marketing twadle is marketing twadle.

It's very popular bullshit. Oh, and that's twaddle, not twadle

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take the counterpoint. I think it makes sense, even though it is not entirely new. Essentially is just another way of saying virtualization, abstracting the software from the physical hardware. Much like virtualization, which IBM created for the mainframe in 1968, it is legit but not new. Virtualized (software defined) servers has been around for awhile and it widely adopted. Software defined (virtualized) networking is rarely used. The idea of creating a management layer independent of Cisco IOS, aka software defined networking, which can be used to rapidly reprogram large scale networks is not trivial.

Although not as rare as networking, software defined storage is also not entirely well known or used. Basically meaning to take a universal storage management layer running on a hosted server above the SAN which then ingests and manages all storage, regardless of make, across the data center. An example being IBM SVC. This has some benefit as you don't need to learn EMC, HDS, IBM, etc, etc management tools.... The end goal of software defined x being a universal orchestration tool, like Amazon uses, to provision server, storage, network for a given workload automatically in a minute or two.

[dan1980]

Software-defined-X, as a concept is fine. Actually, it's utterly old hat.

What the hell are VLANs if not 'software-defined-networking'?

I mean, grab any half-decent switch and you can present a load-balanced application using a MAC address that is not directly related to the MAC addresses of the cards in the servers. You can move this application to a new set of servers connected to the same stack and simply update entries in the switch and on the servers and things work fine.

That's a bunch of homogenous servers, connected to homogenous ports on a stack of identical switches, with traffic segmented and applications presented via . . . software!

Yes, I realise there can be more than that but the problem is that these terms are used as industry buzz-words, used to describe some checklist that marketing came up with.

The idea that SDN is more than just (e.g.) VLANs is true, but VLANs are very much software-defined-networking. Some chaps have got together and decided that networking is only truly 'software-defined' when the control is physically separated from the switching plane. Rubbish.

Sorry - that turned into a bit of a rant!

Short version is that software-defined stuff is f#$king fantastic but it's also ubiquitous.