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Research Explores Adoption of SDN in Local Networks
Having measured adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) technologies in various ways, the latest report from Infonetics Research explores campus LAN deployments.
The findings indicate that 72 percent of enterprises plan to deploy SDN campus LANs in the next couple years.
Infonetics identified some of the top use cases for moving to SDN as automatic provisioning, unification of LANs (wired and wireless), handling bring-your-own-device scenarios and improving network edge security.
"Expectations for SDN in the campus LAN are clear," said company exec Cliff Grossner in a statement. "Businesses taking part in our study want SDN to provide operational cost savings by integrating with existing networks, delivering better security, simplifying management and improving application performance. And they want all this without network interruptions."
The top vendors identified by respondents are, in alphabetical order: Cisco, HP, Juniper, Microsoft and VMware.
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Driving Deployment (source: Infonetics Research)
Other highlights of the for-sale report listed by Infonetics include:
- When asked about barriers to deploying SDN, respondents most often cited interoperability with existing network equipment/management systems, lack of in-house SDN skills and potential network interruptions.
- SDN-capable applications for the campus LAN represent one of the biggest opportunities for third-party SDN, existing virtualization and open source vendors, though existing network vendors are still contenders.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.