While SDN hasn't found much of a home in commercial projects, some companies have fully integrated it with their business plans
Over the past few years, there have been a multitude of reports predicting that widespread SDN adoption is not only inevitable, but explosive. IDC published a study of the SDN market earlier this year and predicted a 53.9% CAGR (compound annual growth rate) from 2014 through 2020, by which point the market will be valued at $12.5b.
However, SDN itself remains largely out of sight in proof-of-concept trials. While that means it hasn’t found much of a home in commercial projects, some companies have fully integrated SDN with their business plans. These companies include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Such major, household-name companies investing heavily in SDN should help everyone believe in the reality of SDN’s global appeal. Google uses it to prioritize traffic like Gmail backups, a capability that will be transferred to their cloud services customers. Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google, told the Open Networking Summit back in 2012 that Google had been using SDN to manage the flow of traffic in its internal network. He also mentioned how he believed Google will hit 100% utilization in an industry where 30%-40% is considered standard.
Empirical SDN
Certainly, 100% utilization is nothing to ignore, and it calls into question why we haven’t seen SDN truly catch hold on a commercial scale. Executives are aware of SDN’s benefits, but those benefits are relatively difficult to quantify. It’s a classic problem — how do you spur the adoption of an unproven technology (how do you get a job without experience)? Everybody believes in SDN, but nobody has the numbers to back it up, so it hangs in commercial stasis.
Executives are still wary of implementing widespread SDN protocols, even though SDN runs alongside traditional network infrastructure without issue. The move toward agile development and continuous delivery is forcing companies to pursue new goals like elastic scaling, agile provisioning, and disaggregation. SDN is the key to realizing these goals, but current adoption rates show a good deal of reluctance. With SDN the network is more easily maintained, less expensive, and more flexible, as well.
SDN means a faster time to market with new services, and new services mean new revenue. It’s likely that application delivery use cases will be the ones to drive SDN adoption, focusing on application delivery improvements and the subsequent revenue increases. Application delivery will be improved by SDN’s operational efficiency, network services automation, rapid time to service, cloud integration, and any number of as-yet-undiscovered benefits that will be noticed upon full deployment.
Efforts to accelerate the future of SDN
In IHS Markit’s fourth annual carrier SDN survey, one-hundred percent of respondents said they intend to deploy SDN at some point. That’s a little too open ended, but there are numerous projects and companies attempting to accelerate the adoption of SDN right now.
Recently, the ONOS Hummingbird release improved support for legacy devices, which will reduce some of the reliance on greenfield deployments for SDN initiatives. The ONOS project offers an SDN operating system for service providers.
Collaboration is at the heart of open source SDN. It seems that every week there are exciting new projects rising from these productive partnerships. Recently, the Open Networking Foundation and Open Networking Lab agreed to become a single organization, combining their 180 companies and 17 partners under one umbrella with SDN standardization as its core goal. Standardization will make SDN integration much easier, meaning adoption rates will get faster as they’re identified and implemented.
Even traditionally closed companies have noticed the success of open source SDN and are swinging open their gates. AT&T is opening its SDN code, ECOMP, in order to leverage the community. If the project is popular enough, it could become the standard everyone is looking for. Everyone involved in SDN realizes that, in order to spur adoption and tip the scales toward widespread deployment, getting as many passionate contributors as possible is the best move.
