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Realizing the promise of software-defined networking

Programmability is the key to claiming SDN’s powerful benefits

Published December 2015

Architectures such as cloud computing and mobility have consumers demanding instant access to goods and services, manufacturers demanding instant access to suppliers and investors demanding instant access to trading floors and market data. The vast majority of organizations are looking to automate IT tasks, accelerate application deployment and better align their IT infrastructure with business requirements. Customers are increasingly looking to software-defined networking (SDN) as a platform capable of hosting a myriad of orchestration and IT workflow automation solutions to drive them toward their goal.

This white paper explains programmability’s pivotal role in realizing the promise of SDN and then outlines all of the components needed to build a software-defined network that’s fully programmable at layers 2 and 3 and layers 4 to 7.