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Software Defined Networking: A New Approach to Delivering Business Agility

Software defined networking (SDN) is creating a lot of excitement in data centers, but current technology is still relatively immature.

In the new research note Ending The Confusion Around Software Defined Networking (SDN): A Taxonomy, Joe Skorupa, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, explains that SDN is not only limited to data center and service provider networks.

Skorupa answered some questions around the current state of SDN and how it will evolve:

Q: What is Software Defined Networking?

A: SDN is a new approach to designing, building and operating networks that supports business agility. SDN brings a similar degree of agility to networks that abstraction, virtualization and orchestration have brought to server infrastructure.

In the SDN architecture, the control and data planes are decoupled, network intelligence and state are logically centralized, and the underlying network infrastructure is abstracted from network applications and features. In addition, programmability enables external control and automation that allow for highly scalable, flexible networks that readily adapt to changing business needs.

While a great deal of attention has been directed toward SDN in data center networks and service provider networks, it can also be applied to campus networks and, enterprise WANs. The applicability and benefits will vary by use case.

Q: What Models Exist for SDN Deployment?

A: Three deployment approaches are possible - switched-based, overlay and hybrid. For greenfield deployments, particularly when the cost of physical infrastructure and multi-vendor options are important, a switch-based model will be common. The biggest limitation to this approach is that is currently does not leverage existing L2/3 network equipment.

When rapid deployment over an existing IP network, or when responsibility for the SDN environment is assigned to the server virtualization team, a tunnel-based overlay approach may be appropriate. With this approach the SDN endpoints are virtual devices that are part of the hypervisor environment. The greatest limitations of this approach are that it does not address the overhead of managing the underlying infrastructure, de-bugging problems in an overlay can be complex and it does not support bare metal hosts.

The third approach combines the first two into a hybrid deployment. This allows a non-disruptive migration with a path toward an eventual switch-based design. Gateways link devices that do not natively support overlay tunnels, such as bare metal servers.

Q: Where might SDN be Leveraged?

A: In a data center context, SDN is a component of the Policy Driven Data Center. It provides the programmable connectivity required to link the network to other components within the data center delivering a more integrated, functional system. For example, a provisioning application could specify that an instance of the CRM application must have certain services delivered in a specific sequence and would ensure that the traffic flows through the appropriate devices in the correct sequence.

In a service provider context SDN might be leveraged to provide a common control plane across multiple vendors equipment including SGSN/GGSN, PE router, session border controller, core router, optical transport/WDM nodes to build an agile, multi-tenant network that is a platform for value added services. Possible service offering could include flexible bandwidth on demand, patch protection/restoration and multi-casting. SDN promises easier integration with OSS/BSS to increase service agility while reducing CapEx and OpEx.

How Can I Decide if SDN is Right for My Organization?

- Begin to explore the potential benefits and risks that SDN will bring to your organization, but beware of SDN-washing which simply re-labels legacy approaches with the latest buzzwords.

- Be aware that SDN has significant potential impacts on security. Your security strategy must evolve with the SDN strategy to incorporate new needs and opportunities brought on by SDN.

- If you focus on the data center network first, be sure to involve server, virtualization, security and storage teams in the discussion to ensure a single approach is adopted.

- The adoption of SDN requires a new way of thinking that may threaten existing network engineers. Identify members of your team with the skills and vision to lead the evaluation process

Related Links:

Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner report: Ending The Confusion Around Software Defined Networking (SND): A Taxonomy

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Software Defined Networking: A New Approach to Delivering Business Agility

Software defined networking (SDN) is creating a lot of excitement in data centers, but current technology is still relatively immature.

In the new research note Ending The Confusion Around Software Defined Networking (SDN): A Taxonomy, Joe Skorupa, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, explains that SDN is not only limited to data center and service provider networks.

Skorupa answered some questions around the current state of SDN and how it will evolve:

Q: What is Software Defined Networking?

A: SDN is a new approach to designing, building and operating networks that supports business agility. SDN brings a similar degree of agility to networks that abstraction, virtualization and orchestration have brought to server infrastructure.

In the SDN architecture, the control and data planes are decoupled, network intelligence and state are logically centralized, and the underlying network infrastructure is abstracted from network applications and features. In addition, programmability enables external control and automation that allow for highly scalable, flexible networks that readily adapt to changing business needs.

While a great deal of attention has been directed toward SDN in data center networks and service provider networks, it can also be applied to campus networks and, enterprise WANs. The applicability and benefits will vary by use case.

Q: What Models Exist for SDN Deployment?

A: Three deployment approaches are possible - switched-based, overlay and hybrid. For greenfield deployments, particularly when the cost of physical infrastructure and multi-vendor options are important, a switch-based model will be common. The biggest limitation to this approach is that is currently does not leverage existing L2/3 network equipment.

When rapid deployment over an existing IP network, or when responsibility for the SDN environment is assigned to the server virtualization team, a tunnel-based overlay approach may be appropriate. With this approach the SDN endpoints are virtual devices that are part of the hypervisor environment. The greatest limitations of this approach are that it does not address the overhead of managing the underlying infrastructure, de-bugging problems in an overlay can be complex and it does not support bare metal hosts.

The third approach combines the first two into a hybrid deployment. This allows a non-disruptive migration with a path toward an eventual switch-based design. Gateways link devices that do not natively support overlay tunnels, such as bare metal servers.

Q: Where might SDN be Leveraged?

A: In a data center context, SDN is a component of the Policy Driven Data Center. It provides the programmable connectivity required to link the network to other components within the data center delivering a more integrated, functional system. For example, a provisioning application could specify that an instance of the CRM application must have certain services delivered in a specific sequence and would ensure that the traffic flows through the appropriate devices in the correct sequence.

In a service provider context SDN might be leveraged to provide a common control plane across multiple vendors equipment including SGSN/GGSN, PE router, session border controller, core router, optical transport/WDM nodes to build an agile, multi-tenant network that is a platform for value added services. Possible service offering could include flexible bandwidth on demand, patch protection/restoration and multi-casting. SDN promises easier integration with OSS/BSS to increase service agility while reducing CapEx and OpEx.

How Can I Decide if SDN is Right for My Organization?

- Begin to explore the potential benefits and risks that SDN will bring to your organization, but beware of SDN-washing which simply re-labels legacy approaches with the latest buzzwords.

- Be aware that SDN has significant potential impacts on security. Your security strategy must evolve with the SDN strategy to incorporate new needs and opportunities brought on by SDN.

- If you focus on the data center network first, be sure to involve server, virtualization, security and storage teams in the discussion to ensure a single approach is adopted.

- The adoption of SDN requires a new way of thinking that may threaten existing network engineers. Identify members of your team with the skills and vision to lead the evaluation process

Related Links:

Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner report: Ending The Confusion Around Software Defined Networking (SND): A Taxonomy

Hot Topics

The Latest

For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...