Published on the 02/02/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
In a bid to ramp up interest in software defined networking (SDN) amongst non-technical procurement executives, Brocade has announced a free one-year licence of its SDN controller…
The flexibility and agility promised by SDN is what vendors constantly spruik – but to date relatively few mainstream organisations have seized the nettle according to Gartner. In a bid to lower the barriers to experimentation, networking solutions business Brocade last week announced that it was offering a free one year licence to its Vyatta controller that will allow organisations to at least pilot the concept.
The free licence allows organisations to manage up to five physical or virtual network nodes in a non-production environment, and have access to 60 days of technical assistance.
Speaking last week, Gary Denman, managing director of Brocade in ANZ, said that the challenge for all businesses and their IT departments was to establish technical infrastructure that could support rapid change in order to respond to changing market conditions. Having an agile nimble, technology platform could also help CIOs avoid being white anted by other executives who might look to source IT independent of the CIO, through so called “shadow IT” spending.
He said that analysis had shown when a vendor or consortium of suppliers went into sell an enterprise solution they would be pitching to an average of 5.2 executives, fewer than half of whom had a technical background, so it could prove challenging to gain consensus. Ben Hickey, Brocade’s director of business development for software networking in Asia Pacific said it was important to be able to deliver “something agile enough, so you don’t encourage shadow IT.”
Brocade argues that open source SDN “provides greater innovation, interoperability and choice, while eliminating vendor lock in” – but to achieve that companies need to have the technical capability to roll out and manage SDNs. Offering a year’s free access to the controller licence delivers a low risk way for IT departments to develop that capability.
Brocade argues that the need for enterprise flexibility means that “the network of the future will be multiservice, multi-tenant, hardware accelerated and software controlled” – and spurred by an increasing appetite for open standards.
Denman acknowledged that the open standards push was a double edged sword for Brocade “because we can be taken out” by other providers of similarly open products and services. But he added: “I see that as healthy tension in the commercials as well as the product.”
