10 Ways Software-Defined Networking Will Change IT
, September 30, 2013 When networking professionals converge upon New York for Interop this week, software-defined networking (SDN) stands to establish itself as a major theme throughout session talks and informal conversations. As the industry watches the results of early adopter case studies and hears pundits advocate for this new means of controlling the network fabric, consensus is building for the potential that SDN could be an IT game-changer. Here's how, in the words of experts from around the industry.
SDN Will Finally Scale The Network For Virtualization Nirvana
In its recent Tech Visions annual report, Accenture explained that now that the industry has virtualized all the disparate pieces of the data center, the software-defined network is the last step to make the connections between these pieces dynamically configurable.
"The data center's resources may be dynamic, but the communications between them are still static and brittle," Accenture wrote. "SDN frees applications from having to maintain knowledge of the changing network."
In the same vein, SDN better supports cloud deployments.
"A cloud-ready network must be able to dynamically respond when IT needs to move large amounts of data, without bottlenecks, security holes or data loss," said Marc Cohn, senior director for market development at Ciena. "SDN makes this happen."
