Steve Wexler raised an interesting question last week: Is SDN revolutionary or evolutionary?
His post touches on a reality that’s been bothering me for years. Almost everyone in IT I’ve spoken to in the last three years–from CTOs to admins–has mentioned that network management is one of the biggest impediments to automating the data center. Most are looking to network programmability, and by extension software-defined networking, to solve that problem, yet most have struggled to really make progress toward this transition.
Why? Because thus far SDN has been too revolutionary (read: highly disruptive). Solutions have required buying brand new equipment or deploying overlays. The heart of the challenge lies in delivering interoperability and manageability–both, highly dependent on the size of the ecosystem around a given solution.
