85 percent of service providers expect data center network operating expenses (Opex) to dip significantly in the software-defined networking (SDN) deployment by the second year, said IHS.
The report is based interviews with service providers that have deployed or plan to deploy or evaluate SDN by the end of 2016.
“Service providers expect SDN to deliver a positive return on investment. Providers expect significant Opex cost reductions within two years of deploying SDN. Capex reductions are also expected, and respondents acknowledge they need to invest in equipment and operational processes to get started with SDN,” said Cliff Grossner, research director for data center, cloud and SDN at IHS.
Service provider respondents named Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent/Nuage and VMware as top SDN vendors.
Service providers that are scaling up their data centers — investing significant Capex in physical servers and virtualization technology — are most likely to deploy SDN.
Simplified network provisioning, network automation, rapid application deployment and interoperability with existing equipment are expectations for SDN.
The top data center SDN use cases among operators surveyed are a cloud architecture for the data center, automated application deployment and hybrid cloud.
editor@telecomlead.com
