Software defined networking is an emerging technology that has captured the imagination of every hardware and software maker whose products touch the network.
So much so that other sectors have jumped in with software-defined storage and software defined data centes, which led one analyst to tease about the advent of software-defined everything. But that’s another story.
But real implementations of SDN exist with carriers and organizations running huge data centres like Facebook. Real world enterprise-sized users are few and far between.
But the benefits are there and more SDN-capable controllers and switches are being rolled out. So where should an enterprise start on this voyage?
Marcia Savage at Network Computing dives into this with by interviewing analyst Eric Hanselman of 451 Research suggesting how enterprises can take the first steps.
I interviewed Hanselman last fall at Interop New York and found his take on SDN level-headed, and in this piece he does the same by suggesting overlay networks are a good first start for the technology.
But remember this point that he makes: “To really leverage SDN, you need some level of sophistication in orchestration. …If you’re not already starting to automate deployment of compute and storage resources, there’s not much point in starting to automate the network.”