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 Drive Up Service Agility
Most experts agree that the way SDN will truly transform networking and IT in general is through its potential upsides in service agility.
"Rather than programming switches and routers to define a service, network operators will define services in an application layer that interacts with a unified control plane for all networking elements," said Chris Koeneman, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for the Bluesocket Business Division of ADTRAN. "Network operators will be able to make changes quickly and finely tune services."
Paul Unbehagen, chief architect for Avaya Networking, said the evolution will make it easier for IT to spin up new applications in minutes rather than hours, days or more.
"It about evolving from what today is a largely manual process to an automated process across various teams to increase IT agility and efficiency and drive down operating expenses," he said.
