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Wanted:  SDN Horror Stories

by Andrew Lerner  |  March 10, 2015  |  Submit a Comment

SDN is slowly matriculating into the enterprise and we estimate there are now over 1,000 production deployments. To date, feedback from early adopters has been surprisingly positive. The software generally works as advertised, and early implementers have been given the white-glove treatment by vendors. In fact, the biggest issue to date has been cultural/organizational. However, as we start to cross the chasm to mainstream implementations, there will be some problems.

To date, we’ve run across just a very small number of actual SDN disasters. One in particular that stands out is a failed bake-off, but it was at very large scale (25,000+ VMs) which isn’t exactly a mainstream scenario. The only publicly reported SDN “issue” I’ve run across was this article here. So overall, not enough data points to draw concrete conclusions.

That said, we’re looking to publish research on SDN failures, to identify pitfalls that enterprises should avoid.  So, please let us know of any, and these can include both production and non-production implementations (i.e., failed “bakeoffs”).  If you know of any, please reach out via email or Twitter, or leave a comment…

Regards, Andrew

#TheDarkSideofSDN

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Category: networking  sdn  

Tags: sdn  

Andrew Lerner
Research Vice President
6+ years at Gartner
21 years IT Industry

Andrew Lerner is a Vice President in Gartner Research. He covers enterprise networking, including data center, campus and WAN with a focus on emerging technologies (SDN, SD-WAN, and Intent-based networking). Read Full Bio




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