One of the biggest upheavals inside enterprise systems now involves networking. Old-school hardwiring is quickly being overtaken by new-generation, software-defined networks. For the vast number of enterprises of all sizes, this new world of software-defined networking (SDN) is attractive for a number of reasons—manageability and cost containment being chief among them. Software-defined wide-area networks (WANs) have roots in SDN, the underlying principle of which is to abstract the network hardware and transport characteristics from the applications that use the network. SD-WAN is a method of deploying a wide-area network that uses software-defined networking to achieve greater agility and flexibility. Companies competing in the space include VeloCloud, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, CloudGenix, Riverbed, Talari, Glue Networks and Viptela. In Cisco Systems Senior Marketing Manager Kiran Ghodgaonkar offers some key data points for network administrators to consider as they plan an SD-WAN deployment.
- eWeek