Software defined networks are seemingly everywhere these days, offering the promise of having a virtual network infrastructure that can be provisioned as easily as spinning up a new virtual server or storage network. But SDNs are also hard to find outside of a few marquee customers who have dedicated lots of operational resources to set them up and manage them.

In my story for Techtarget’s Modern Infrastructure ezine, I look at the history of SDN, where things stand today, some of the bigger obstacles and how you can begin to plan for them in your own data center.