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Software-defined infrastructure (SDI) combines software-defined compute (SDC), software-defined networking (SDN) and software defined storage (SDS) into a fully software-defined data center (SDDC). A software-defined data center is an IT facility where infrastructure elements such as networking, storage, processing and security are virtualized and delivered as a service. With SDI, software can control the entire computing infrastructure without human intervention. SDI is hardware independent and programmatically extensible, providing unlimited growth potential for heterogeneous environments.

The SDI model allows many critical IT functions to be fully integrated and automated, such as backups and data recovery. Applications can specify and configure the hardware they need to run on as part of their code. Thus, SDI automatically handles application requirements, data security and disaster-preparedness functions. Software-defined infrastructure is open source, allowing IT resources to be flexibly configured per-application on commoditized hardware. This improves data center agility and efficiency while decreasing hardware costs. SDI supports configuration rollback and cloning by versioning the data center landscape. Management dashboards can be used to provision and monitor the software-defined infrastructure. SDI is capable of placing workloads in private or public clouds.

SUSE Manager can help businesses utilizing SDI solutions to reduce costs and drive innovation by supporting new business processes such as DevOps. Built for Linux, Manager is an SDI management solution that centralizes the management of Linux systems, virtual machines and containers. It provides automated software, asset, patch and configuration management as well as system provisioning, orchestration and monitoring across a variety of hardware architectures, hypervisors and cloud platforms.