Software-defined networking (SDN) has been around long enough that it faces a paradox: Everyone thinks they know what SDN is, but many don’t actually realize how far SDN has evolved from its origins and how varied SDN solutions have become.
International Data Corp. (IDC) gets to the heart of the matter in its 2018 IDC Innovators report, calling SDN “an architectural approach to data center networking in the cloud era … to support digital transformation, data center networks must become agile, both architecturally and operationally. They must possess the intelligent automation that will make them ‘cloud-like’ and increasingly autonomous.”