SDN Is No Longer Just About the Hype, Quinstreet Survey Finds

The software-defined networking market is moving beyond the hype, with more businesses using or planning to use SDN in the near future, a Quinstreet survey finds.

Thirty-nine percent of the 466 IT professionals surveyed said they either are currently using SDN technology in their infrastructures or are planning to within the next 12 months. Another 10 percent said deployment will come in the next 13 to 24 months, and 25 percent said they plan to deploy, but don’t yet have a timeline.

Forty-three percent of respondents are running virtual LANs (VLANs), but that isn’t surprising given that they’ve been around for three decades. However, relatively few are looking to deploy them down the road. Meanwhile, 16 percent have deployed NFV, and 22 percent expect to do so within the next 24 months.

According to the survey, the top benefits for SDN are costing savings (53 percent), improved network performance (47 percent), increased productivity (46 percent) and improved security (45 percent).

Forty-seven percent said cost savings was the top challenge in deploying SDN, followed by integration/interoperability (42 percent), security (37 percent) and choosing the right deployment model (35 percent).

Of the three top deployment models—the cloud, virtual switches and bare-metal systems—28 percent are choosing the cloud, thanks to the ability to easily update networking appliances. Thirteen percent said virtual switches, and 6 percent picked bare-metal systems.

Fifty-three percent of respondents said they are using a combination of the three deployments models.

The top reason for deploying SDN in the cloud? Sixty-nine percent said it makes updating network appliances much easier. Other reasons include partitioning IP/Ethernet addresses into multiple subnetworks (58 percent), multitenancy/cloud support of networking services (56 percent), and removing routing intelligence and traffic management from devices (56 percent).

The open-source cloud platform—with its Neutron networking project—is very or extremely important, according to half of the respondents. That’s especially true for larger enterprises and small businesses, though only about a third of midsize companies feel that way.

Nineteen percent of respondents using SDN came from the tech industry, and another 12 percent from telecommunications. Eleven percent were from banking and financial services, 9 percent each from education and manufacturing, and 8 percent from federal, state or local government.

Forty-five percent of respondents said they are currently using Cisco’s SDN technology, while another 36 percent said they were either in the early stages of consideration or the request-for-proposal (RFP) evaluation stage. Cisco was followed by Citrix Systems, VMware, Dell and IBM.

Larger enterprises are most likely to buy SDN products from large networking vendors, while midsize companies are more likely to look at the channel and niche suppliers.