Complicating the analysis of all of this, however, is the fact that there are a variety of SDN solutions available and a variety of ways to consume those solutions. Some providers, for example, are focusing on the dynamic movement of virtual workloads and leveraging the server hypervisor and techniques such as encapsulation and tunneling, while others are striving to achieve software control of the network by using the OpenFlow protocol to manipulate the flow tables in switches.
