SDN: What Do CIOs Need to Know? - Page 3
CIOs considering SDN have a lot to think about. What changes will it bring, what are its use cases and business benefits, and what challenges does it create?
SDN and virtualization vendors to watch
Shah also mentioned VMware, who "has a lot to say on the matter," and Juniper. "They don't quite have the market share [of Cisco], but they are making concrete steps in this direction, and what they're doing is going to be important," he said.
But the vendor that got Shah's highest acclaim was Cisco. "Given their market share for their infrastructure—everyone's got Cisco—watching what they do becomes important. They've already taken some steps in the space, and they're continuing to accelerate that pace," he said. He agrees with Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure approach to software-defined networks. It is something that "resonated well for a lot of CIOs," Shah observed, since at the end of the day, the applications are the point of the data center.
No vendor should be taken off the table at this point, according to Shah. Despite recent advancements in the technology, SDN is still at a relatively early stage, "still climbing" its Gartner hype curve. But "we're getting close to the peak," he said.
The past year has seen major developments in SDN, developments which have taken it from a little-understood buzzword to something approaching accepted reality. Driven by these developments, enterprise mindsets are also evolving. What else do CIOs need to know about SDN? Let us know in the comments.
Jude Chao is executive editor of Enterprise Networking Planet. Follow her on Twitter @judechao.
