Data centre priorities change as Software-Defined Networking adoption rises in enterprise
- 05 October, 2015 03:40
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) adoption in the data centre is gaining strong interest with Software-Defined Wide-Area Networking (SD-WAN) emerging as the next wave of network innovation for remote and branch office locations.
Results from a recent Riverbed Technology survey - conducted at VMworld 2015 - claims that by all indications, a software-defined approach to networking is seeing an increased interest among organisations.
Findings show that 77 percent of survey respondents believe organisations are at some level of participation with software-defined networking solutions within their data centre (SDN), including 13 percent that have already deployed SDN.
The survey also finds that 29 percent are exploring similar architectures for their remote branch office locations (SD-WAN), including nearly five percent who have fully implemented SD-WAN solutions today.
“With the increasing complexity in today’s hybrid IT environments, organisations seek better ways to have full visibility and deliver applications across their distributed enterprise,” says Paul O’Farrell, Senior vice president and general manager of the SteelHead and SteelFusion business, Riverbed Technology.
“With the rise of SaaS applications, coupled with an insatiable demand for more bandwidth, traditional approaches to wide-area networking no longer meet the needs of business.
“The emerging area of SD-WAN allows applications to be delivered securely and optimally across hybrid networks and hybrid clouds with reduced cost, increased speed/agility and streamlined management.”
O’Farrell says the top three drivers for adopting a software-defined approach to networking in order of importance are, firstly, being able to deploy new applications and services more quickly.
Secondly, reducing costs and thirdly, reducing mistakes when deploying applications and services.
“While the survey clearly indicates we’re still in the early days of SDN and SD-WAN, we expect that over the next three-five years many organisations will deploy a SD-WAN solution as a modern replacement for traditional branch networking solutions,” O’Farrell adds.
“Riverbed has been evolving our products the past several years to address this emerging market, and we plan to further invest R&D resources to ensure superior application performance in hybrid environments - from the data centre to the branch to the cloud - over the most optimal network.”
The Riverbed survey was conducted over the course of the VMworld 2015 conference, questioning 260 attendees from a variety of roles and with a median company size of 2,300 employees.
