Survey: How valuable is SDN to the enterprise?
The need for greater agility and control in the networking realm in order to manage environments more effectively has produced evolutionary advances over the past few years. One such example is Software Defined Networking (SDN), which offers the next step in network traffic control, whereby software and policies are used to define consistent network behavior and responses, rather than individual hardware device.
For instance, SDN can direct network traffic to least-used resources in a load balancing arrangement so that redundant systems can share workloads more effectively. This increases network and system response times and in turn can lead to better applications which are well-suited to utilize these advantages. In addition, SDN offers better scalability and the ability to control heterogeneous environments such as a local data center linked with cloud services.
The topic of SDNwas covered in-depth on Tech Pro Research three years ago via a survey and subsequent research report. The report indicated that at least half of respondents had no knowledge of the topic of SDN, showing it was a burgeoning concept that hadn't reached all audiences. Other insights yielded by the report included:
- Do not attempt an SDN implementation without trained staff. Current interfaces usually require knowledge of SDN's common development language and a solid understanding of how to achieve business improvements the technology promises.
- Consider an incremental implementation, using end-of-life and spot solutions to learn how SDN might fit into your overall infrastructure architecture.
- Make an effort to determine if SDN might help you tame the increasing complexity of managing cloud services, vendor access, and anytime/anywhere access.
- SDN is coming, albeit slowly; don't let your competition derive the business benefits inherent in a manageable SDN implementation while you struggle with command-line instructions and inconsistent device management. The report also revealed that, "While providing much promise, SDN is largely suffering adoption woes because of large vendor indifference. Although this seems to be changing, it will be some time before organizations that tend to lag behind the cutting edge decide to add SDN to their annual project lists."
Tech Pro Research is revisiting the topic of SDN via a new survey to see how it has developed since 2013; who is using (or familiar) with it, which vendors are leading the pack, and what new details or perspectives may be shared. Please share your experiences on the topic.
Tech Pro Research is ZDNet's premium content sister site.
See also:
Research: Leaders share software-defined networking's benefits, obstacles, favored vendors
IT leaders slow to embrace software-defined networking
Juniper Networks embraces SDN, decouples Junos from the hardware