Yesterday I talked about the “union” of implementations of the cloud, SDN, and NFV revolutions. My key point was that this implementation would inevitably converge because there won’t be three future infrastructures, but only one. A corollary to that point is that however vendors start their own path to this converged future, they’ll close ranks and converge themselves. We have two announcements that demonstrate how complicated that is—one from Brocade and the other from Overture.
Brocade is a fusion of storage and networking technologies most recently augmented (perhaps even “defined”) by their acquisition of Vyatta and the notion of software routing and switching. Last year, Brocade took an incredible leap forward in strategic influence because they framed an NFV position around virtual switching and routing—essentially saying that NFV starts with the functions you virtualize. That was such a refreshingly logical view that Brocade was rewarded with greater influence on planning, but they didn’t follow up effectively and lost their edge. Their announcement was aimed in part at delivering on a new model that does capitalize on their previous vision. There are 3 elements to that.
First, Brocade has to understand that every network switching and transport device isn’t going to be replaced by soft switches and routers from Brocade, or anyone else. The network is an ecosystem, there are different value propositions in each piece, and Brocade has to live with that. Their response is to classically abstract the network into Connection Services, SDN Structural Services, and Functional Orchestration. The highest level provides generic linkage between service models that applications create or consume and the means whereby those models are instantiated. SDN Structural Services is aimed at driving those “means” more into an OpenDaylight direction, essentially harmonizing different devices and vendors on a common control mechanism.
Functional Orchestration is in some sense the ecosystem capstone, and also the place where Brocade virtually asserts it’s relying on third parties. By including the layer, Brocade acknowledges that “services” will have to be coerced out of hardware and software through some DevOps-like but more advanced process set. They’re not naming that process, committing to provide it, or (beyond the inevitable reference to OpenStack) naming what does provide it.
What Brocade has done is a solid evolution from a VNF-driven vision of NFV into a holistic vision of what software-centricity at the network would look like. They’ve identified the pieces correctly, I think, and they’ve embraced the inevitability of multi-vendor networks and supported a credible model to converge all the pieces on an agile and operationally efficient service set. The only thing they have not done is to cover that orchestration and management angle explicitly. Keep that point in mind, please.
Then we have Overture. Overture is a carrier Ethernet company who launched itself into the next-gen services world with a controller they call the Ensemble Service Orchestrator. When you look at the details of what ESO can do (not what Overture says they’ll do with it), you see what I believe to be the most functionally complete management and orchestration framework that anybody has productized.
But remember, Overture sells carrier Ethernet switches. Can they stand up and shine in a market area whose issues of management integration, cloud integration, orchestration, and OSS/BSS are hardly their strong suits? It would be a long pull for sure, so Overture has announced a premises platform called the 65vSE, a “virtual service edge” that is designed to host an agile set of virtual network functions to augment services and improve in particular self-provisioning of service features by enterprises.
Anyone who reads my blog and follows industry news realizes that this isn’t the first service edge device or strategy that has been linked to NFV (nor will it be the last). However, a hardware edge product is a credible evolution of NFV aspirations for a carrier Ethernet player, particularly given that the tactical focus of many operators for NFV will be business-service enhancement through service chaining.
Service chaining prospects pose a risk to operators, particularly up front. If hosting stuff is the right answer, and if you expect there to be a resource pool on which to host, where is it? When you start marketing you have no customers anywhere, so where’s the best place to start? You can hardly launch an agile service and tell the first dozen or so customers they’ll have to wait while you build data centers. Edge hosting, as I’ve said, is smart for service chaining because costs scale in a linear way—every customer hosts their stuff on-prem until you get compelling economies of scale to justify centralizing some stuff.
Edge hosting isn’t the only thing you need to address this, though, and while Overture didn’t play it up much in their announcement, what makes their service-edge strategy compelling isn’t the device but the backing that the Ensemble Orchestrator provides. You’d have to get some plugins and cooperation from both Overture and other vendors to fill out the approach, but ESO could deploy VNFs across an arbitrary mixture of premises service-edge boxes and servers, wherever the latter happen to be sited. It could also integrate the package with deployment and management systems and practices. Overture has secret sauce in this space, perhaps in fact more “secret” than they should let it stay. I said before that Overture underplayed their own superior orchestration position, and they still do. Given that NFV success is the only way to drive success at the NFV edge, that seems risky to me.
I think by now you see a common thread. Vendors are all coming at SDN and NFV from the same starting point and converging on the same finish line. What’s different is that the starting point is defined by market/sales needs and the finish line by technology. Brocade’s strengths are not Overture’s, and vice versa. Naturally both will grab onto the next low apple based on their position in the orchard and not just the position of various apples. Neither have articulated that final converging technology yet, perhaps because it’s too difficult to sell a story of that magnitude to either media channels or customers.
The question is whether a short-range step sells to customers either. Can any cloud, SDN, or NFV position be sold even as a long-term goal without specific instructions on how that long-term goal creates a business case that drives evolution? Maybe staying in bacterial form is good enough; that beach looks awfully dry and dangerous. That’s the question that Brocade, Overture, and everyone else must address before they take their own route out of the primordial network ooze and into the future.
