The Software Defined World
Before computers were around, typically things were done using pencil and paper. Since the introduction of the computers, it revolutionized the world. From the way we did business to how we entertain ourselves. As one of the greatest inventions ever invented, ranked up there in book along with the automobile, the microwave and the air conditioner.

From a business standpoint, computers gave companies an edge. The company that leverages technology best will have the greatest competitive edge in their industry. In a similar fashion, on a personal level, the person with the newest toys and the coolest toys are the ones that can take advantage of the latest software and apps. Giving them the best efficiency in getting their jobs done while attaining bragging rights in the process.

The Computer Era has seen some milestones. I have listed some highlights below.

The PC (Personal Computers)
The mainframe was the dominant platform as computers and were mainly used in companies with huge air-conditioned rooms as they were huge machines. Mainframes were not personal. No one had the room nor money to utilize them. Aside from businesses, access to the mainframe was mainly in specialized schools, colleges, libraries and/or government agencies.

The industry was disrupted by a few entries into home computing.

TANDY TRS-80 Model 1
Tandy corporation made their TRS-80 Model 1 computer powered by the BASIC language. It had marginal success with most consumers of this computer in schools. There wasn’t really much software for it but was a great educational tool to learning a programming language

TIMEX SINCLAIR
The Timex Sinclair was another attempt but the underpowered and tactile feel keyboard device was very limited. It had a black and white screen and an audio tape player as the storage device. There was more software available for it, but it never took off.

COMMODORE VIC 20/ COMMODORE 64
The Commodore Vic 20 and Commodore 64 was a different kind of computer. It had software titles available along with the release of the computer. It was in color and offered “sprite” graphics that allowed for detailed, smooth animations in color. The computer was a hit as it also offered an affordable floppy disk drive (5.25”) as the storage device.

APPLE AND IBM
Apple and IBM paved the way into the homes not just because they had a better piece of hardware, but there was access to software such as word processing, spreadsheets and databases (and not just games). This was the entry of the Personal Computer. There were differences between Apple and IBM where IBM was not user friendly and largely text based while Apple took a graphical route offering a mouse and menu driven Operating System that made the computer “friendly”.

Commoditization for Progress
Now that the home computer age has begun, the commoditizing of that industry also started shortly there after. With vendors like Gateway, Lenovo, HP and Dell, making these computers became cheap and plentiful. With computers being so affordable and plentiful, HPC (High-Performance Computing) or “grid” computing has been made possible. HPC/Grid Computing is basically the use of 2 or more computers in a logical group to share resources to act as one large computing platform. Trading firms, Hedge Funds, Geological Study and Genetic/Bio Research companies are just some places that use HPC/Grid Computing. The WLCG is a global project that collaborates more than 170 computing centers in 40 countries to provide resources to store, distribute and analyze over 30 petabytes of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the Franco-Swiss border. As you can see, commoditization enables new services and sometimes “disruptive” technologies (ie. HPC/Grid). Let’s take a look at other disruptive developments…

The Virtual Reality Age
With PCs and home computers entering the home, the world of “Virtual Reality” was the next wave. Multimedia capable computers made it possible to dream. Fictional movies like Tron and The Matrix gave us a glimpse into the world of virtual reality. Although virtual reality has had limited success over the years, it wasn’t a disruptive technology until recently. With 3D movies making a comeback, 3D TVs widely available and glass cameras, virtual reality is more HD and is still being define and redefined today.

The Internet
No need to go into extensive details about the Internet. We all know this is a major disruption in technology because we all don’t know what to do with ourselves when it is down. I’ll just recap the inception of the Internet. Started as a government / military application (mostly text based) for many years, the adoption of the Internet for public and consumer use was established in the early 90s. The demand for computers with better processing and better graphics capabilities were pushed further as the World Wide Web and gaming applications became more popular. With better processing came better gaming and better web technologies. Java, Flash and 3D rendering made on-line gaming possible such as Call of Duty and Battlefield.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
This is the latest disruptive trend is BYOD. As the lines between work and personal computing devices are being blurred. Most people (not me) prefer to carry one device. As the mobile phone market revolutionized 3 industries (Internet, phone, music device) it was only natural that the smart phone would be the device of choice for us. With the integration of high-definition cameras into the phones, we are finding less and less reason to carry a separate device to just take pictures with or a separate device for anything. There is a saying today, “There is an App for that”. With the commoditizing of cameras as well, Nokia has a phone with a 41 megapixel camera built in. With all that power in the camera, other challenges arise like bandwidth and storage to keep and share such huge pictures and videos.

The Software Defined Generation
There is a new trend that is finally going to take off but has been around for a while. This disruptive technology is called Software Defined “X”. The “X” being whatever the industry is. One example of Software Defined “X” is 3D printing. It was science fiction at one time to be able to just think up something and bring it into reality, but now you can simply defining it in software (CAD/CAM) and the printer will make it. What makes 3D printing possible is the cost of the printer and the materials used for printing due to commoditization. It wasn’t because we lacked the technology to make this earlier, it was just cost prohibitive. Affordability has brought 3D printing into our homes.

Software Defined Storage
Let’s take a look at Software Defined Storage. Storage first started out as a floppy disk or a hard drive. Then it evolved into a logical storage device consisting of multiple drives bound together in a RAID set for data protection. This concept of RAID was then scaled into SANs today that store most of our business critical information. This concept RAID has been commoditized today and is now a building block for Software Defined Storage. Software Defined Storage is not a new concept, just was not cost effective. Since the cost of high-performance networking and processing becoming affordable, Software Defined Storage is now a reality.

Software Defined Storage technology is taking the RAID concept and virtualizing small blocks of storage nodes (appliances-mini SANs) and grouping them together as a logical SAN. Because this Software Defined Storage is made up of many small components, these components can be anywhere in the architecture (including the cloud). As networking moves into 10Gb and 40Gb speeds and Fiber Channel at 16Gb speeds and WAN (Wide Area Networks) at LAN speeds, processors entering into the 12+ cores (per physical processor) and memory that can process at sub-millisecond speeds Software Defined Storage can virtually be anywhere. It can also be stretched over a campus or even between cities or countries.

In the world of commoditizing everything, the “Software Defined” era here.