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SDN: Can't Define It - Gotta Have It

Brad Reinboldt

It is no surprise that in this year's State of the Network annual survey of network professionals, Software-Defined Networks (SDN) was the prevailing topic. Yet in 2009, it wasn't even on the radar. And while SDN is all the buzz, this year's survey showed that not everyone is on the same page. In fact, when asked to define SDN, 37 percent of the network managers and engineers defined SDN as being "like a road trip without a map".




Click on picture to download a PDF of the State of the Network infographic


While no clear definition of SDN could be agreed upon, it was very clear that SDN has IT talking, with 12 percent regarding SDN as critical.

The survey also showed that IT departments are at odds with each other as to how important SDN is to a company and why. About 47 percent, nearly half, of network management did not think SDN was important, while more than half of network engineers said they'd just ride out the hype.

That being said, adoption amongst participants is projected to grow at a steady pace from the 12 percent of early adopters today, to 22 percent of respondents indicating they will have SDN in place by the end of 2014 and 32 percent by the end of 2015.

Why? Because SDN is not just about cost reduction — it's about making an organization agile. The top drivers of SDN cited in the State of the Network survey included the need to improve the network's ability to dynamically adapt to changing business demands (48 percent) and to deliver new services faster (40 percent). Others indicated lowering operating expenses, decreasing capital expenses, improving the ability to provision network infrastructure and designing more realistic network infrastructures as reasons behind SDN deployment.

With the many major initiatives IT is juggling, such as Big Data, Cloud services, Unified Communications (UC), Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and 40Gb deployment, it is no wonder that IT departments have SDN in their sights. Whether network professionals can define it or not, many are rapidly deploying SDN while others seem to be evaluating what is hype vs. tangible benefits for their company before future deployment.

About the State of the Network Global Study: The State of the Network Global Study has been conducted annually for seven years. This year, Network Instruments engaged 241 network professionals to understand and quantify new technology adoption trends and daily IT challenges. Respondents were asked, via a third-party web portal, to answer a series of questions on the impact, challenges, and benefits of SDN, UC, Big Data and Application Performance Management. The results were based on responses by network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs from around the globe. Responses were collected from January 10, 2014 to March 7, 2014.

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SDN: Can't Define It - Gotta Have It

Brad Reinboldt

It is no surprise that in this year's State of the Network annual survey of network professionals, Software-Defined Networks (SDN) was the prevailing topic. Yet in 2009, it wasn't even on the radar. And while SDN is all the buzz, this year's survey showed that not everyone is on the same page. In fact, when asked to define SDN, 37 percent of the network managers and engineers defined SDN as being "like a road trip without a map".




Click on picture to download a PDF of the State of the Network infographic


While no clear definition of SDN could be agreed upon, it was very clear that SDN has IT talking, with 12 percent regarding SDN as critical.

The survey also showed that IT departments are at odds with each other as to how important SDN is to a company and why. About 47 percent, nearly half, of network management did not think SDN was important, while more than half of network engineers said they'd just ride out the hype.

That being said, adoption amongst participants is projected to grow at a steady pace from the 12 percent of early adopters today, to 22 percent of respondents indicating they will have SDN in place by the end of 2014 and 32 percent by the end of 2015.

Why? Because SDN is not just about cost reduction — it's about making an organization agile. The top drivers of SDN cited in the State of the Network survey included the need to improve the network's ability to dynamically adapt to changing business demands (48 percent) and to deliver new services faster (40 percent). Others indicated lowering operating expenses, decreasing capital expenses, improving the ability to provision network infrastructure and designing more realistic network infrastructures as reasons behind SDN deployment.

With the many major initiatives IT is juggling, such as Big Data, Cloud services, Unified Communications (UC), Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and 40Gb deployment, it is no wonder that IT departments have SDN in their sights. Whether network professionals can define it or not, many are rapidly deploying SDN while others seem to be evaluating what is hype vs. tangible benefits for their company before future deployment.

About the State of the Network Global Study: The State of the Network Global Study has been conducted annually for seven years. This year, Network Instruments engaged 241 network professionals to understand and quantify new technology adoption trends and daily IT challenges. Respondents were asked, via a third-party web portal, to answer a series of questions on the impact, challenges, and benefits of SDN, UC, Big Data and Application Performance Management. The results were based on responses by network engineers, IT directors, and CIOs from around the globe. Responses were collected from January 10, 2014 to March 7, 2014.

Hot Topics

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...