Why SDN Now?
Social media, mobile devices, and cloud computing are pushing traditional networks to their limits. Compute and storage have benefited from incredible innovations in virtualization and automation, but those benefits are constrained by limitations in the network. Administrators may spin up new compute and storage instances in minutes, only to be held up for weeks by rigid and oftentimes manual network operations.
SDN has the potential to revolutionize legacy data centers by providing a flexible way to control the network so it can function more like the virtualized versions of compute and storage today.