One of the most logical places for operator interest in open-source software to focus is in the area of virtual network functions (VNFs). Most of the popular functions are available in at least one open-source implementation, and operators have been grousing over the license terms for commercial VNFs. It would seem that an open-source model…
Author: Tom Nolle
For IoT, Forget Network Virtualization and Think “Thing Virtualization!”
How can we best accommodate the notion of virtualization to the application of IoT? That’s a question that more and more operators and vendors are wrestling with, and it’s a good one. The answer might be interesting and disruptive—think less about virtualizing the network and more about virtualizing the “things”, the sensors and controllers. I’m…
How Equipment Vendors Can Counter Cautious Operator Spending
With the exception of Huawei, network equipment vendors are facing tightening spending by operators. The reason, obviously, is that compression in profit-per-bit that I’ve been talking about—the compression that’s led to operator support for “transformation” and their interest in SDN and NFV. Since SDN and NFV have not evolved fast enough and far enough to…
The Implications and Impacts of Verizon’s End-to-End Hierarchical Modeling
It has always been my view that NFV would be better and more efficient if there were a common modeling approach from the top layer of services to the bottom layer of infrastructure. I still feel that way, but I have serious doubts on whether such a happy situation can now arise. The service-centric advance…
What We Can Learn from Verizon’s SDN/NFV Paper
Verizon has just released a white paper on its SDN/NFV strategy, developed with the help of a number of major vendors, and the paper exposes a number of interesting insights into Tier One next-gen network planning. Some are more detailed discussions of things Verizon has revealed in the past, and some new and interesting. This…
The Best Approach to SDN and NFV isn’t from ETSI or Open-Something, but From the MEF
I had a very interesting talk with the MEF and with their new CTO (Pascal Menezes), covering their “Third Network”, “Lifecycle Service Orchestration” and other things. If you’ve read my stuff before, you know that there are many aspects of their strategy that I think are insightful, even compelling. I’m even more sure about that…
Is Ericsson’s NodePrime Deal Even Smarter Than it Looks?
Ericsson has made some pretty smart moves in the past, long before their smartness was obvious to the market. They may have made another one with their acquisition of NodePrime, an hyperscale data center management company that could be a stepping stone for Ericsson to supremacy in a number of cloud-related markets, including of course…
Is There a Future in Augmented/Virtual Reality?
Last week there were a number of stories out on virtual reality (VR). It’s not that the notion is new; gaming developers have tried to deliver on it for a decade or more, and Google’s Glass was an early VR-targeted product. One interesting one was a joke. On April 1st, Google spoofed the space with…
Could Brocade’s StackStorm Deal Be the Start Of Something?
The acquisition of StackStorm by Brocade raises (again) the question of the best way to approach the automation of deployment and operations processes. We’ve had a long evolution of software-process or lifecycle automation and I think this deal shows that we’re far from being at the end of it. Most interesting, though, is the model…
How to Make SDN and NFV About Zeros Instead of Nines
We chase a lot of phantoms in the tech space, none as dangerous as the old “five-nines” paradigm. Everyone obsesses about getting reliability/availability up to the standards of TDM. That’s not going to happen unless we don’t do the kind of network transformation we’re talking about. Five-nines is too expensive to meet, and we don’t…