The SDN Application I Want to See

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

• SDN applications are not exciting to enterprises and aren’t generating much interest.
• SDN applications that drastically improve operations and application performance are a vendors’ ticket to success.

We know that network congestion impacts application performance. The physical network matters because bottlenecks in the physical network will impact overlay networks regardless of what some folks at VMware want you to believe. We also know that some applications have more stringent demands than others. Real-time media such as IM, voice, and video are affected more by long delay and delay variability (jitter) than lack of capacity. Audio and video CODECs can adjust for some degradation based on network conditions, but let’s face it, those adjustments are a precursor to unrecoverable poor quality. We also know that other applications are more tolerant towards delay and jitter like email or HTTP.