The Core Technical Attributes & Business Attributes of SDN?

The lively debate during our first Roundtable on “SDN: Reality Check!”, as well as the slew of email discussions that flew back-and-forth between the almost two dozen+ experts on our distribution list, was plenty evidence that the SDN debate is contemporary, valuable, exciting, and very much alive!  (If you’d like some background on this whole series, then you’d want to look here and here.)

In the last blog post, I gave you a preview of what Roundtable#1 was like, and pointed you to the audio links as well as transcripts of the discussions.

Following Roundtable#1 and the discussions, I made an attempt to classify the key distinguishing characteristics of SDN into “core technical attributes” and “business (or market-driven) attributes”.

The idea wasn’t that one set is more important than the other. Rather, it was to capture all of  the attributes that the expert group was pointing to, but to do so in appropriate buckets, so that it would be easier to agree to and discuss those.

Another objective was to find a set of attributes that would be common to SDN solutions whether in the data center (the traditional stronghold of SDN), or in a telco service provider environment (where it will invariably have  an impact).

The initial list of attributes and our document capturing them is found here.

What is your view? Do you think we’re on target? Is there a significant attribute that we missed? Do you think the attributes for SDN in the data center are fundamentally different than those for SDN in the telecom service provider network? Or, are there common features that should be asbstracted?

You may share your comments below, on our Carrier Ethernet Linked In Group (where discussions are ongoing), or register here, and submit your top 3 questions for possible consideration at a subsequent Roundtable or on the Panel (for details, scroll to the bottom of the page) at the MPLS & Ethernet World Congress 2013, on March 20th!

Let us hear from you!

Again, the list of attributes we compiled is here, and the next blog post in this series that gives the exiting details of “SDN Reality Check!” Roundtable#2 is here.