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Getting SDN live in data centers is proving to be a tall task, according to a recent report.
IHS Markit's data center survey found that two thirds of the service providers were still in the lab trial phase of data center SDN, which was down a bit from three quarters in the 2015 survey. Also, the number of service providers that were in production trials and live deployments last year fell short of the expectations by those that took part in the 2015 survey.
The survey also found that while service provider bare metal switching deployments had stalled, more bare metal switches were in-use for SDN. On average, 24% of the bare metal switch ports were in-use for SDN in 2016, which was a 12% increase over the results in the 2015 survey. Overall, bare metal switch ports accounted for 33% of the of respondents’ data center Ethernet switch ports, which was the same as IHS' report in 2015.
Most of the bare metal switches were still being deployed by large cloud service providers (CSPs). The reason, according to the report, was because skilled programmers who were proficient at dealing with bare metal switching were required to ensure success.
IHS Markit interviewed service providers that had deployed, planned to deploy or evaluate SDN by the end of 2018 in regards to their strategies for evolving their data centers.
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— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation
