Making sense of the SDN landscape in 2016
Keeping track of the SDN landscape is a full time job with a dizzying array of standards bodies, industry consortiums, and vendors weighing in on all aspects of SDN. SDN will impact every aspect of IT in the data center, LAN and wide area driven by new demands from IT and the business, new product capabilities, new purchasing requirements, and evaluation of features such as programmability and software support not commonly associated with networking. Let’s sort it all out using data from our 2015 Global SDN Survey and assessments of the market changes.
There two critical areas you need to keep track of. The first is your chosen networking vendor’s product roadmap. Every network equipment vendor and start-up has an SDN strategy. Understanding what they strategy is will help you make informed choices that align with your organizations goals. In the data center, the move to 10, 25, 40, and 100Gb Ethernet will require a hardware refresh, so it’s a good time to revisit your existing vendor’s roadmap and evaluate others. For remote offices, replacing existing WAN connectivity with the Internet as a backbone is possible with SD-WAN products which offer far more versatility than other VPN technologies.
The second area to keep track of is standards development, industry consortiums, and vendor's partner ecosystems. SDN is impacted more by integration capabilities than anything else because the word "software" covers everything from more intelligent network equipment to integration capabilities and development features like accessible API's and SDK's.
You have to make informed decisions to maximize your SDN investments. We'll lay out the SDN landscape and highlight the critical, new features and capabilities you need when evaluating SDN.
Presented by
Mike Fratto,
Principal Analyst, Enterprise Networking and Data Center Technology
Mike is a Principal Analyst on the Business Technology and Software team covering the Enterprise Networking and Data Center Technology markets. He has extensive experience reviewing and writing about enterprise remote access, security, and network infrastructure products.
Prior to Current Analysis, Mike was with TechWeb for over 15 years finishing as Editor of Network Computing. He was Lead Analyst with InformationWeek Analytics, Senior Technology Editor with Network Computing and Executive Editor for Secure Enterprise. He has spoken at several conferences including Interop, MISTI, the Internet Security Conference, as well as to local groups. He served as the chair for Interop's Data Center and Storage tracks. He also teaches a network security graduate course at Syracuse University. Prior to Network Computing, Mike was an independent consultant.
Mike graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelors of Information Science and Technology.