Infographic: SDN’s Pulse Among Service Providers

As Howard Baldwin recently wrote in InfoWorld, the lure of new enterprise technology is great, but then comes the inevitable uncertainty about how in the world to manage it. The backdrop for his comment is the service provider survey we conducted last month at the SDN/MPLS International Conference in Washington, D.C.  Production deployment of SDN is way up among service providers, but nearly all are concerned about management.

Baldwin concludes his article by pointing out that although SDN holds great promise for automating and managing WAN operations, traditional management tools, processes, and standards will not work. The good news, he says, is that “…IT is not only being liberated from hardware-specific configuration, it’s also being liberated from hardware-specific management. In other words, you’ll be able to manage devices the way you want to, not the way the application dictates.”

Right now that’s more of a hope than a concrete solution. At Packet Design, we have made some headway on our concept of an SDN Platform. See a demo here.

For more details about the survey, see our recent post: “SDN Deployments/Worries Rise Among Service Providers”