A question – specific to F5 technology – was raised during the panel session I moderated at Gartner DC 2012 that for me, at least, raised an interesting question. Well, actually it wasn’t just that question, but rather the question was the icing on the cake after hearing commentary from enterprise IT attendees on the subject of SDN.
Yes, there’s already a spate of SDN-washing, similar to cloud-washing, that’s going on in the market. While ONF certainly laid out a set of characteristics defining SDN, those characteristics are not a concrete list of requirements. It’s not, after all, an RFC, with an easy to evaluate list of “MUST NOT, MUST, SHOULD NOT, and SHOULD” requirements. As Captain Barbosa said, “…the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rule.”