Customers, vendors, and analysts simultaneously agreed on Tuesday that software-defined networking (SDN) has grown old and stale — and is ready to give way to a new era of durable, unchanging hardware.

"Wow, that was a waste of time," said one data-center operator who just spent millions deploying a state-of-the-art SDN-based data center. "I'm so over SDN. When's the next bubble?"

Indeed, many universities noted that Ph.D. students have stopped focusing on SDN. Instead, they're intent on pioneering a radical new approach of hardware-defined networking (HDN).

"They've talked about SDN since before Angry Birds was invented," said one student. "It's about time this old regime gave way to modern thinking."

Unlike SDN, where virtual machines can't be seen and sometimes vanish without warning, HDN will allow operators to see, touch, and even taste every new job that starts running in the network. "Right now, we're assigning a separate CPU to every non-virtual machine (NVM) on the network, but ultimately, we hope to give every NVM its own system or even its own rack," one vendor representative explained.

"We waste so much space in data centers," one Fortune 500 CEO remarked. "Why can't we put rows of equipment between the rows we have already? My people keep talking about 'access' and 'walking,' but obviously they're just resisting the HDN revolution."

Of course, SDxCentral will be here to document the revolution as it happens. "Renamed HDNCentral, our site will be the definitive source of news for this hot new trend," said founders Matt Palmer and Roy Chua, who really need to stop talking at the same time.

Google, in particular, seems excited about the new trend. Sources have confirmed that the mysterious Google barge in San Francisco Bay is, in fact, the casing for a single non-virtual machine. It's being used in a trial of a new HDN protocol in which NVMs are moved from one data center to another through the use of ocean vessels. VMware's vMotion could be made obsolete by the new SeaMotion protocol, sources claim.

"Seeing, even literally steering your packets — now, that's network visibility," said one analyst. "It's time to make way for the future."