"SDN is ready to go," says Kaoru Yano, chairman of the Japanese tech giant NEC to his audience at the Open Networking Summit in Silicon Valley this week. At a conference last fall on software-defined networking (SDN), many presenters spoke of the promise of SDN to bring the same type of virtualization to the network that has made server and storage IT resources more efficient. This time, presenters such as Yano described actual implementation of SDN in production data centers. Although SDN has a