SDN Market Sees Continued and Expected Growth in the Coming Years

Today many IT departments are moving towards software-defined networking (SDN) in their data centers. SDN is an approach to computer networking where control is separated from the physical infrastructure and allows network administrators to manage network services and support a network fabric across multi-vendor equipment. As an emerging architecture that is manageable, adaptable, dynamic, and cost-effective, SDN is ideal for high-bandwidth and demanding applications. There are many trends driving IT administrators to this network change, including changing traffic patterns, the rise of big data and cloud services, increasing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, the inability to scale, and vendor dependence.

There are many benefits of using software defined networking including flexibility in how the network can be used and operated, improved uptime through eliminating manual intervention, lowering operational costs, infrastructure savings, better planning with increased visibility into the network, and better management through Managed Service Providers (MSP).

In a study published in August 2014 by Infonetics Research, titled Data Center and Enterprise SDN Hardware and Software Annual Market Size and Forecasts, the firm stated that it found that the enterprise and data center SDN market grew 192 percent in 2013 and is expected to reach $18 billion by the year 2018. Up from 2012, the in-use SDN Ethernet switch revenue, including bare metal switches, branded Ethernet switches and virtual switches, grew ten-fold. This increase was found to be a result of the increases in white-box bare metal switch deployments by large cloud service providers such as Amazon and Google.

At the top of the in-use SDN-capable switch in the data center is the bare metal switch, which is expected to account for 31 percent of the total SDN-capable switch revenue by the year 2018. Infonetics Research also predicts that leaders in the SDN market will emerge during the upcoming years as lab trials transfer into live production deployments. In the meantime, the transition of SDN network virtualization overlays is predicted to reach mainstream buy 2018.

To conduct this study Infonetics Research gathered data by tracking SDN controllers and Ethernet switches in-use as well as SDN-capable Ethernet switches. 

For the complete study, please visit: http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2014/Data-Center-and-SDN-Market-Highlights.asp