One of the potential attendees of my SDN workshop sent me a long list of questions. Almost every networking engineer, team leader or CIO asks the first one:

What will happen, if we don´t follow the SDN hype (in the short term, in the medium term and in the long term)?

Answering this question is the whole idea of the workshop.

The up-to-date list of scheduled SDN workshops is available on my web site.

The workshop will give the attendees enough information to decide what they should do (or not), based on what makes sense in their environment. We’ll go through the potential SDN architectures and tools, and describe their benefits and drawbacks.

Can NETCONF and YANG be used for security devices?

In principle, YES. I will try to find out whether any security devices (apart from Juniper SRX) support NETCONF (if your favorite security device supports NETCONF, please write a comment).

What do I do with the variety of vendors in an enterprise network (Cisco, Juniper, VMware, MS, AIX, Solaris, HP, Extreme, Brocade)?

That's another one of the major topics of the workshop: how do I handle the incompatibilities between major vendors. NAPALM is one of the obvious steps in the right direction.

How do I persuade the responsible people like internal IT, carrier, other IT service providers?

There's obviously no clear answer to this question, but the workshop is usually full of discussion along these lines (because someone inevitably brings up this set of problems and we always try to answer all the questions that are raised in the workshop, regardless of whether they are deeply technical or not).

Do we need full rights for all devices? If so, what is the impact on existing contracts with the device operators and which possibilities exist for an implementation?

It depends on the vendor implementation of role-based access control, and yet again, we'll discuss that during the workshop when we’ll talk about NETCONF and Puppet/Chef support.

Want to know more?

The workshop description and the current list of scheduled SDN workshops is available on my web site. At the moment you can choose between Heidelberg (Germany) and Stockholm (Sweden), there will be an SDN event in Rome in late October and we’re working on a US workshop.

If you can’t attend one of these workshops, get the Advanced SDN Training or buy the ipSpace.net subscription, which also gives you access to all SDN material available on ipSpace.net.