Research shows that 79% of North American businesses are planning to have software-defined networking (SDN) in live production in the data centre in 2017.
According to an Infonetics’ study, “Data Centre SDN Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey”, provides new data on how the enterprise data center SDN market is evolving, including insights on the intent of enterprise buyers to help vendors determine how to invest in product development and position their products in the marketplace.
“We asked enterprises from which vendors they plan to source data center SDN hardware and software for the physical network, network OS, controller, orchestration software, applications, and virtual network overlays. Many will turn to incumbent network vendors, of course, but a big ‘a-ha’ moment for us was seeing how many plan to look to non-incumbent network vendors, including third-party SDN vendors, open source vendors, existing virtualization vendors and others,” says Dr Cliff Grossnew, research director for data center, cloud and SDN at Infronetics Research.
“As SDN in the enterprise data center grows legs in 2015, thought leadership in this nascent market will give way to market share leaders with measurable revenue. Now is the time for existing and new vendors to grab market share. Respondents are moving from lab trials in 2015 to production trials in 2016 and to live production in 2017,” Grossner says.
Highlights from the research include:
* Cisco by far (71%), then IBM, Juniper and VMware were named most by enterprises when asked whom they consider to be the top three SDN hardware or software vendors, a measure that reflects a vendor’s overall brand strength;
* 65% of survey respondents are currently conducting data center SDN lab trials or will do so in 2015;
* Respondents’ expectations for SDN in the data center are clear: they want better security, application performance, and simplified management — without causing network interruptions;
* Popular data center SDN use cases include automation for disaster recovery, provisioning, application deployment, and enabling hybrid cloud;and
* Data centre orchestration software represents one of the biggest opportunities for third-party SDN vendors and existing virtualisation vendors.
