Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

What exactly is the data center interconnect (DCI) opportunity, and how does it relate to cloud computing, SDN, NFV, and the cloud?  That’s a question that should be asked, isn’t asked often, and might have a significant impact on the way we build the most important part of our network.  Obviously it’s going to have…

Modeling is critical for both SDN and NFV, and I’ve blogged on the topic a number of times.  In particular, I’ve been focusing on “intent models” as a general topic and on the OASIS TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) in particular.  The two, as we’ll see, have a relationship. A recent set…

Any time a Tier One decides to open the kimono a bit on their planning for transformation it’s important.  AT&T did that with its paper on ECOMP, which stands for “Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management, and Policy” and the topic makes the comments doubly important.  As operators seem to be looking to take on more of…

The interest being shown in ONOS’s CORD architecture (see this Light Reading piece) isn’t a surprise to me (see my own blog on it here) but it’s an indication that CORD might be even more influential because of a singular fact—integration and “packaged solutions” are much more in CORD’s DNA.  I don’t agree that it’s…