Slashing the software-defined hype

Benefits of SDN are clear and there are options beyond rip-and-replace as well, executive says

Emphasise the potential to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and boost scaleability to sell software-defined networking (SDN), says Avaya's Jean Turgeon.

Turgeon, vice president and chief technical solutions marketer for software-defined architectures at the comms vendor, said there is a need to "cut through the hype" when it comes to things software-defined.

"The key drivers and opportunities with SDN from a business point of view include the expectation that an enterprise can move at cloud speed -- and that's not reality," he said.

The enterprise actually needs to move towards software-defined architectures to fulfil this expectation. SDN can help achieve this by boosting "elasticity" or scaleability, which enables organisations to meet fluctuations in demand as they happen, he said.

Turgeon said SDN promises greater efficiencies across the infrastructure that facilitate business agility, boosts provisioning speed, and can lower TCO.

"Everyone wants a lower TCO -- capital and operational expenditures must be reduced," Turgeon said.

Furthermore, it isn't necessary, he noted, for customers to do a forklift-replace of their IT infrastructure to get the benefits -- although each case must be considered on its own merits.

Turgeon said deploying a fabric overlay for network virtualisation can help achieve SDN benefits for customers, as an alternative to going the SDN controller with SDN stack route.

Turgeon was promoting Avaya's approach around SDN in a keynote at this week's IP Expo Europe.