By Patrick Burke

The networking layer of the data center may be the next segment of IT to undergo some disruption, putting it on par with servers and storage, which have seen major changes with the help of cloud computing, virtualisation and other trends designed to improve efficiency and performance.

Software-defined networking, or SDN, has been around for several years now and is utilized by such big-name players as Rackspace.

But the technology is poised to gain more of a foothold in the data center. SDN offers clients more flexibility and less down time if they need to expand from their current server usage.

For the most part, networking has not evolved at the same pace as servers and storage, and networking has become somewhat of a costly bottleneck. SDN’s goal is to take tasks currently handled by hardware and perform these tasks in the software.

The intelligence of …