riverbed software defined it survey

Software Defined IT SurveySDN and SD-WAN Important Areas for IT innovation

By Joshua Dobies, Senior Director, Product Marketing

© 2015 Riverbed Technology. All rights reserved. 2

Survey was conducted at VMWorld 2015 in San Francisco Live survey intercepts 260 responses

Methodology


SDN adoption is gaining strong interest Early days for extending SDN to the branch SD-WAN is emerging as the next wave of network innovation

Key Findings


77% involved with SDN

Top reasons? – Deploy new apps/services more quickly– Reduce costs– Reduce mistakes when deploying apps/services

Biggest SDN challenges? – Performance– Reliability– Lack of IT staff SDN experience

SDN adoption is gaining strong interest


*45% of respondents plan to extend SDN to cloud or remote offices

*201 answered [Are you deploying SDN outside the data center?]. 58% chose either Branch/remote offices or Cloud. That is 116 people. 116 people represent 45% of the total pool of 260 respondents.

Early days for extending SDN to the branch


*29% involved with SD-WAN – Most are still just discussing– Only 10 of the 260 we spoke with are currently implementing SD-WAN

SD-WAN is just emerging

*117 out of 260 total respondents answered [What is your organization’s involvement with SD-WAN]. See slide #16 for total percentage breakdown from 117 people.


2,300

0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500

Median

How many employees work at your organization worldwide? (Median)

2,300

0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500

Median

How many employees work at your organization worldwide? (Median)


20%

17%

16%

13%

12%

8%

7%

4%

2%

1%

1%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%

Systems administrator

Other

Datacenter/network architect

Manager of Information Systems or Computer Systems

Network engineer

Director in a computing area

Systems analyst

Vice President or Senior Vice President in a computing area

CTO

CIO

CISO

What is your role?


33%

5%

5%

4%

3%

3%

3%

3%

3%

3%

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

2%

1%

1%

1%

1%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40%

California

Illinois

Texas

Wyoming

Florida

Georgia

Massachusetts

New Jersey

Tennessee

Arizona

Connecticut

New York

Ohio

Virginia

Idaho

Kentucky

Michigan

Missouri

Nebraska

North Carolina

Pennsylvania

Indiana

Kansas

Nevada

New Hampshire

In which state do you live?


12%

11%

38%

10%

17%

13%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%

I am not familiar with that term

We are not pursuing SDN and have no plans to do so

We are discussing SDN

We are in trials for SDN

We are implementing SDN

We have already implemented SDN

What is your organization's involvement with software-defined networking (SDN)?


17% 18% 18% 18% 19% 18%

12% 12% 14% 14% 14%

27%

71% 69% 68% 68% 67%

54%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Increase the speed withwhich we deploy new

data center applicationsor services

Reduce costs Reduce mistakes madewhen deploying datacenter applications or

services

Reduce mistakes madewhen deploying cloud

applications or services

Increase the speed withwhich we deploy newcloud applications or

services

Reduce vendor lock-in

How important are each of the following drivers in terms of why your organization is pursuing SDN?

Extremely/somewhat unimportant Neither important nor unimportant Extremely/somewhat important


13% 16% 18% 17% 16% 15%20%

23% 20% 18% 23% 25%33%

31%

64% 64% 64%60% 59%

52%48%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Performance issues Reliability issues Lack of SDN expertiseby our IT staff

Cost Lack of visibility totroubleshoot

performance issues

Existing SDNsolutions are not asmature as we would

like

Our existinginfrastructure doesn't

fully support SDN

How impactful are the following challenges you face (or think you will face) with implementing SDN?

Extremely/somewhat unimpactful Neither impactful nor unimpactful Extremely/somewhat impactful


30%

28%

27% 28% 28% 29% 29% 30% 30% 31%

Branch and remote offices

Cloud

Are you deploying SDN outside the data center?


52%

42%

38%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

Infrastructure Services (File, Print, AD, DNS, DHCP)

Network Services (vRouter, vFirewall, vWAN optimization, etc.)

Business Applications

How are you extending virtualization to your branch offices? [Mark all that apply]


52%

27%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

Infrastructure that uses separate boxes for servers and storage

Hyper-converged infrastructure (servers and storage from a single vendor in asingle box)

What kind of infrastructure are you using for your branches?


22%

13%

42%

4%

9%

10%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 45%

I am not familiar with that term

We are not pursuing SD-WAN and have no plans to do so

We are discussing SD-WAN

We are in trials for SD-WAN

We are implementing SD-WAN

We have already implemented SD-WAN

What is your organization’s involvement with software-defined wide-area-networking (SD-WAN)?


Slide 1: Software-Defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is getting a lot of attention these days. But just how common is SD-WAN in the enterprise? To find out, Riverbed sponsored a survey of networking professionals at the 2015 VMWorld show in San Francisco …

Slide 2: We interviewed 260 networking professionals at VMWorld as they walked the show floor. We gathered 260 responses. Here is what we found …

Slide 3: We’ll dive into each of these findings in more detail in a minute, but at the highest level we found that SDN adoption is gaining strong interest in the data center, but it is early days for extending SDN out to the branch or remote offices. In addition, the survey indicated that SD-WAN is following just behind SDN and emerging as the next wave of network innovation in the market. Let’s look at these results in more detail …

Slide 4: First, we found that enterprises are beginning to move the needle in terms of SDN adoption, with most (77 percent) currently involved in some way with SDN adoption. Why? The top reasons cited include the ability to deploy new apps and services more quickly, reducing costs and reducing the mistakes made when deploying these new apps and services. That said, adopting SDN is not without its challenges. The most commonly cited were performance, reliability and the fact that most enterprise IT departments lack SDN experience. What about the branch and remote offices? Are enterprises extending SDN beyond the data center?

Slide Notes: Narration for Key Findings


Slide 5: Some are, but most are not (yet). We found 30 percent are pushing SDN to branch and remote offices while 28 percent are pushing SDN to the cloud. This leads directly to our original question … just how common is SD-WAN within enterprises? We asked those currently going forward with SDN to tell us. *201 people answered [Are you deploying SDN outside the data center?]. 58% of those chose either Branch/remote offices or Cloud. That is 116 people. 116 people represent 45% of the total pool of 260 respondents.

Slide 6: Not very common, as it turns out. Less than a third (29 percent of all respondents surveyed) are currently involved with SD-WAN, with most of those still in the discussion stage. In fact, just 1 in 26 are currently implementing SD-WAN. It seems that SD-WAN is in very early stages. That said, there is sizable interest in this early-stage technology and Riverbed believes SD-WAN is following in the footsteps of SDN as the next big wave of network innovation in the enterprise. *117 out of 260 total respondents answered [What is your organization’s involvement with SD-WAN]. See slide #16 for the breakdown.

Slide Notes: Narration for Key Findings


Slide 7: N=260 Slide 8: N=260 Slide 9: N=260 Slide 10: N=260 Slide 11: N=260 Slide 12: N=260 Slide 13: N=201 Slide 14: N=143 Slide 15: N=143 Slide 16: N=117

Slide Notes: Survey Graphs