After reading Sean Michael Kerner’s article in Enterprise Networking Planet earlier this month, I thought I’d add a few thoughts of my own to what he wrote. He discusses SDN and IPv6. Here’s my take on Software Defined Networking (SDN) in 2015:
Given the ongoing hype and the range of benefits its proponents extol, I expect to see a continued increase in interest and evaluation of SDN. However with the ongoing battle between the major SDN vendors (OpenFlow, Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, Contrail, etc.) and the fear of ‘backing the wrong horse’, the lack of proven, mature enterprise deployments and the management and monitoring difficulties associated with SDN (most NMS do not yet adequately support SDN) it is unlikely that wide-scale enterprise deployments of SDN will occur in 2015. Whilst the perceived benefit of easing the management and implementation of distributed security policies, access-control and QoS by deploying SDN is undeniably appealing, lack of maturity will hold back wide-scale deployment for some time to come.