Don't Let SDN Infatuation Go To Your Head

As I say software-defined networking, and I begin to feel a little " as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the " How I love you? Let me count the ways “Fame. After all, what more can you ask of a technology (or a framework? ) , Which promises to reduce CAPEX / OPEX network and probably offers the development of new applications and services , a push? Los enterprise customers, in particular, should be particularly enamored, as much of the promise of SDN focuses on deployment in the data center.
But so widespread and amorphous is the current provider SDN market, depending on who's counting, there are at least a couple of dozen vendors out there. That's pretty impressive when you consider that economically things are really only entertain together.

I was hoping that the launch of its infrastructure Cisco Application Centric (ACI) for networking, data centers, when viewed in light of AT & T domain ad Provider 2.0, it could be an indication that Cisco has had his finger on the pulse of the data center market, offering customers a road map for SDN reasonable.

That apparently was an illusion. In fact, if you buy in a report on AT & T domain of financial services firm MKM Partners, is not good news for Cisco at all. Of the 10 vendors analyzed by MKM Partners, Cisco just received a "negative” in terms of long-term impact of AT & T’s technology vision domain 2.0 for data center network and wide area. By contrast, Alcatel -Lucent and Juniper, Cisco rivals in the market for switches and routers, have had the opportunity to win 50-50 AT & T Business 2.0 Domain.

Why is not Cisco ACI in running AT & T's future data center business? The short answer, according to the report, is that AT & T is looking for a more open society ACI Cisco. The report predicts that AT & T has no plans to deploy SDN in the data center by 2015, and " probably at least a year or more than that in 2016 before a WAN SDN controller is distributed.”

You do not have to look far to see why even a large company like AT & T SDN is be cautious. Take, for example, the SDN controller, which is the brain of any implementation of SDN (or heart, if you're a fan of Liz Barrett) . Roy Chua in SDNCentral has published a concise list of suppliers SDN controller. And ' evident from the list is that there are a range of drivers in several flavors, with many suppliers that produce more than one (Cisco triplets) .

One would have to be an irreducible optimist to believe much has changed since six months ago, when the network of experts Jim Metzler according to the opinion of the famous architect Igor Yahoo Gashinsky that " SDN is not ready for production in typical enterprise network " but also warned that "if iT organizations are becoming know and try SDN today, they are going to be left behind."

That sounds like a pretty fair assessment and good advice. Companies may not want to place their bets at the moment in any of the available options SDN. When large technology companies, such as AT & T, Amazon and Google, make decisions, which will bring a level of market discipline. At this time, there is not much to like about SDN - except reality. And it's not true love.The telecommunications sector for over two decades as an analyst and editor makes.