Nick, SDN works very well even for tiny networks. Look at Ubiquiti’s SDN controller. Yes, it requires proprietary hardware (proving SDN isn’t only for commodity hardware). But it can scale a network of a single switch up to hundreds of switches with a single point of configuration. You want a new VLAN across the entire network? It’s a couple clicks. Want to deploy an new SSID in one department? A few more clicks. It’s very well designed for small- and mid-sized networks.
Bigger networks use other products. But there is an SDN solution off-the-shelf today for every size. -mel via cell > On Jul 21, 2020, at 1:22 PM, Nick Hilliard <n...@foobar.org> wrote: > > William Herrin wrote on 21/07/2020 20:21: >> This is happening a lot in the big shops like Amazon that can afford >> to employ software developers to write purpose-built network code. > > IOW, it works if you have a large and homogeneous enough network with a > sufficiently narrowly product portfolio that you can justify the cost of > getting enough programming skill to make the cost/benefit ratio work. > > Some networks are like this; many aren't. > > In fairness, most networks would benefit from some degree of automation. > > Nick >
