Choose a specific industry (health care, banking, education, etc.) and use a tool such as Microsoft Visio to design an SDN system. Remember that within an SDN system, the software is decoupled from the hardware. SDN moves the control plane that determines where to send traffic to software and leaves the data plane that forwards the traffic to the hardware. This process allows network administrators who use software-defined networking to program and control the entire network via a single pane of glass instead of on a device-by-device basis.

Make sure to include and label the three parts to a typical SDN architecture, which may be located in different physical locations:

• Applications, which communicate resource requests or information about the network as a whole.
• Controllers, which use the information from applications to decide how to route a data packet.
• Networking devices, which receive information from the controller about where to move the data.