Over the past year, Software-Defined Networking awareness has skyrocketed in the mainstream.
Most organisations are aware of the technology and now have plans to at least evaluate it.
That said, there is still some confusion around the technology, and here are the top 7 misconceptions we see, versus last year.
#1 – SDN is just for cloud and service providers
This was and remains the number one myth over the last 12-18 months.
While the early SDN adopters have been cloud providers and folks with large-scale networks, the benefits of SDN (agility, cost, management, innovation) apply to the mainstream, and even mid-market.
#2 – SDN is for the data centre only
While much of the SDN talk is in/around the data centre (“Hey, I can spin-up VMs in minutes why does it take a week to get network/firewall changes“), SDN has applicability in the WAN and Campus as well.
The WAN in particular is a pain-point for many clients as it often takes weeks/months to get bandwidth provisioned and it is very expensive.
Not to mention that enterprise bandwidth doubles every 2.9 years and managing hybrid WANs is difficult.
#3 – White-Box Switching is SDN
This holds steady at #3 from last year. You can do white-box (and brite-box) with and without SDN, and vice versa.
They are related in the sense that once you move intelligence to the controller, you need less feature capability in the hardware. But people can (and certainly are) doing them independently of one another.