Only time will tell, but SDN could very well be the future of networking.  It will drive innovation, allow for new competition, and decrease the time to market of new features in the network.  Ideally, it will also drastically improve operational efficiencies with a suite of applications to more easily manage the network infrastructure.  Doesn’t it seem obvious by now that the hardware and software that are now so tightly integrated for every vendor should be de-coupled?

In this post, I’m going to write about possible SDN applications that I’ve been thinking about for the past few days.  It’s more thinking out loud than anything else, but I’m not talking about OpenFlow applications, but rather the next layer up, which will include the integration of applications between an OF/SDN controller and other existing or new applications located in an Enterprise Data Center. 

I was initially thinking, what existing devices are aware of the overall state of the applications, systems, and security in a data center?  What other controllers, head-end systems, and manager of manager’s are out there that could make sense to integrate with an OpenFlow controller to create a smarter network?