INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business
SDN a driving force
for enterprise network
innovation
SDN is still at an early stage in the Middle East. The growth in the SDN
market will be driven by companies working towards solving existing
problems with networks – security, robustness and manageability and by
innovating new revenue generating services on network infrastructures,
writes Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, MEMA at Brocade.
U
orchestration tools. Cloud service
deployment will be faster, data centre
management will be simpler and
network operation will be easier.
These include network virtualisation,
programmatic control of the
infrastructure, automation and
dynamic configuration, on-demand
service insertion and pay-per-use, all
through standards-based software
Many network operators expect
the near-term benefits of SDN to
be operational in nature: greater
management efficiency, fewer
interoperability challenges, and possible
OpEx reduction. However, the original
promise of SDN—faster, custom
innovation through programmability—
provides new opportunities for rapid
service innovation and monetisation
for organisations with the resources
ltimately, the goal is to provide
a highly flexible, cloudoptimised network solution
that is scalable within the cloud. In
our view, this “new” network will be
powered by fabric-based architectures,
which provide the any-to-any
connectivity critical to realising the full
benefits of SDN.
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and processes in place to develop and
deploy them.
Not surprisingly, SDN has seen
early adoption in service providers
and large enterprises with earlyadopter IT cultures and active cloud
deployments. On the other hand,
smaller organisations with very finite
infrastructure resources and staff are
using SDN to manage traffic spikes and
large flows in more efficient ways.
SDN will be replacing some of
the functionalities that were built
into networking hardware so
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