SDN will reduce data center opex for service providers, says analyst firm

Service providers that have either implemented or plan to deploy or evaluate SDN by the end of 2016 say they expect data center operating expenses to decline by the second year of their deployments, according to a new IHS Infonetics study.

The research firm found that 85 percent of survey respondents said there are four main benefits from implementing SDN in the data center: simplified network provisioning, network automation, rapid application deployment and interoperability with existing equipment.

IHS said that the service providers most likely to deploy SDN include those that are scaling up their data centers -- investing significant capex in physical servers and virtualization technology. These investments are being driven by the need develop a architecture for the data center, automated application deployment and hybrid cloud services. Service provider survey respondents named Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent/Nuage and VMware as top SDN vendors. Release