The future of SDN in 2018 moves toward increased automation

The market for classic #SDN -- defined by a standards-based separation of the control plane and the data plane and tied together by the #OpenFlow protocol -- continues to hum along quietly in the background, growing slowly, but growing nonetheless. Nemertes Research found 13% of enterprises run some OpenFlow in their infrastructures, and another 13% plan to do so by 2018. This OpenFlow deployment is typically only in part of the data center and, in many cases, is entirely virtualized, with the controller running on a virtual machine and the data plane consisting of virtual switches only.

The future of SDN could show variations of the technology becoming more prominent among enterprises, as organizations look increasingly toward programmability and automation.

The key word for the future of SDN this year is more -- more software-defined networking vendors, more options...

Sign in for existing members

Continue Reading This Article

Enjoy this article as well as all of our content, including E-Guides, news, tips and more.

I agree to TechTarget’s Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and the transfer of my information to the United States for processing to provide me with relevant information as described in our Privacy Policy.

I agree to my information being processed by TechTarget and its Partners to contact me via phone, email, or other means regarding information relevant to my professional interests. I may unsubscribe at any time.

and more deployments.

The market for classic SDN -- defined by a standards-based separation of the control plane and the data plane and tied together by the OpenFlow protocol -- continues to hum along quietly in the background, growing slowly, but growing nonetheless. Nemertes Research found 13% of enterprises run some OpenFlow in their infrastructures, and another 13% plan to do so by 2018. This OpenFlow deployment is typically only in part of the data center and, in many cases, is entirely virtualized, with the controller running on a virtual machine and the data plane consisting of virtual switches only.

Vendors like Big Switch Networks also pitch parallel deployment scenarios, in which a software-defined network lives alongside a conventional network. This option could power a management or monitoring network, or possibly provide a more flexible, affordable and enhanced security zone that connects two conventional network segments.

The future of SDN offers many options

In the forefront, different variations of SDN -- especially software-defined WAN -- grow quickly and spread widely. Whether we're talking about Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, VMware NSX or one of the other systems, they all share many of the goals found in classic SDN, including the following:

centralized control;control policies focused more on services and applications than on addresses and ports;network virtualization to make it possible to deliver a logical network over an existing physical network;a network that is cheaper to operate, more automated and more resilient; andnetwork programmability, usually made possible through APIs on the controller.

More than 30% of organizations have SDN in place, and Nemertes is tracking steady upward trends for the future of SDN. These trends are driven by a number of factors, including the following:

http://searchsdn.techtarget.com/tip/The-future-of-SDN-in-2018-moves-toward-increased-automation