Software-Defined Networking and the Enterprise
At the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Spring 2016 conference today, Glue Networks announced that it is making a development kit available through which IT organizations can extend its network orchestration software across networking equipment from multiple vendors.
Glue Networks CEO Jeff Gray says that previously, the company’s Gluware network orchestration software was used primarily to manage routers and switches from Cisco. But via a Dynamic Network Development Kit, the company is now extending the reach of its networking software so that internal IT organizations can easily adopt it.
In fact, Gray contends that one of the primary reasons that software-defined networking (SDN) adoption is moving so slowly is that networking vendors are essentially asking network administers to learn how to program to administer their networks. In contrast, Gluware enables network administrators to manage multi-vendor networks at a high level of abstraction without forcing them to learn how to program.
In a world where IT teams are expected to be more agile, Gray notes that provisioning network resources still takes weeks. The result is a perception that networking in terms of providing agility is lagging significantly behind servers and storage.
In time, of course, SDN will become simpler to deploy in a multi-vendor environment. In the meantime, however, for those IT organizations that can’t wait for SDN technologies to mature, a whole other layer of orchestration abstraction can be employed starting much sooner than later.
