Turbonomic Blog

One if the biggest challenges in the IT industry can be the overwhelming use of buzzwords, acronyms, and nomenclature that often leaves us confused as readers, and as writers.

“Okay, I think I’ve figured this thing out. You can go up and down, but not side-to-side, or … back in time.”

Our team was in attendance at the recent Cisco Live US in July, a conference and tradeshow, targeted at network engineers, the main user group of Cisco networking technologies. When those network folks - as they like to refer to themselves - stopped by our booth, we had pretty much the same conversation over and over again, in short: networking and data center operations technologies are connected, but the teams don’t really talk to each other, unless the packets hit the fan so to speak. That means that nobody seems to talk unless an application is down and data center operations suspects a networking issue to be the source of that failure.

Let’s start by saying congratulations to SDN! Network virtualization technologies are finally starting to proliferate the datacenter, delivering on the abstraction and flexibility at a network layer that hypervisors did at a compute layer nearly 15 years ago. And with the development of new technologies comes the inevitable complexity and need for orchestration tools to manage the network.

In today’s Internet age, we implement new technology and build new products to achieve one goal - to run applications faster, more fluent, and less “laggy”. However, even when we do have the capacity to power our applications, IT admins and developers often battle against the elusive frustration of storage and network latency [for some reason compute gets a pass :-) ].

Have you ever moved something in your kitchen because it fits better, only to find that you spend more time having to go and get it where you used to have it closer at hand? This is a simple analogy, but does relate to some confusion that is happening around SDN and microservices implementations.

The SDN acronym seems to be every where these days. Since it is still relatively new to many people in the industry, it seemed good to do a quick primer on SDN, some of the key players in the space, and why SDN is needed in the industry.