OpenStack has been seen by most as an essential element in any NFV solution, but lately there have been questions raised on whether OpenStack can meet the grade, meaning “carrier-grade” or “five-nines”. Light Reading did an article on this, and Stratus recently published an NFV PoC that they say proves that OpenStack VIM mechanisms are…
Author: Tom Nolle
What NFV Standards Have to Address to Make the Business Case Work
According to a recent piece on SDxCentral, “Operators don’t want the TM Forum to get lost in NFV technicalities. They want the focus on making money.” That’s an interesting and insightful couple of sentences, for several reasons, and it may be a signal of a sea change in NFV. The obvious question is who’s going…
Approaching the SDN/NFV End-Game
OK, I admit to liking old songs and poetry, so you’ll probably not be surprised if I quote a song title; “How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?” I don’t propose to blog on oceans or skies here, but depth and breadth is an interesting question posed to SDN and NFV. We…
How SDN Could Jump Over NFV in Deployment
SDN came along well before NFV, and there are many SDN implementations compared with “real” (meaning actually complete and useful) NFV. Despite this, SDN became a bit of a junior partner to NFV at least among network operators. Even in my own deployment models, it’s clear that the easiest path to SDN deployment would be…
Looking a Bit Deeper at the NFV Business Case
I got over a hundred emails after my series on making the business case for NFV. A few didn’t like it (all of these were from the vendor community) but most who contacted me either wanted to say it was helpful or ask for a bit more detail on the process. OK, here goes. You…
Comparing the NFV Data-Model Strategies of Key Vendors
I think that most of my readers realize by now that I think the data modeling associated with NFV is absolutely critical for its success. Sadly, few of the players involved in NFV say much about their approach to the models, and I’ve not been able to get the same level of detail from all…
Why (and How) Infrastructure Managers are Critical in NFV Management
In a number of recent blogs I’ve talked about the critical value of intent modeling to NFV. I’d like to extend that notion to the management plane, and show how intent modeling could bridge NFV, network management, and service operations automation into a single (hopefully glorious) whole. In the network age, management has always had…
The Technical Steps to Achieve Service Operations Automation
If the concept of service operations automation is critical to NFV success and the NFV ISG doesn’t describe how to do it, how do you get it done? I commented in an earlier blog that service operations could be orchestrated either within the OSS/BSS or within MANO. The “best” place might establish where to look…
How an NFV Sales Story Can Get Wall Street “Tingly Inside”
Remember from yesterday’s blog that the goal of an NFV business case should be to “make the Street all tingly inside.” That means that NFV’s business case has to be made in two interdependent but still separate tracks—one to justify new capex with high ROI and the other to create an opex-improving umbrella to improve…
What Do Salespeople Think of NFV?
If there’s a front line for NFV, that front line is the sales effort. Since I’ve started to blog about the difficulties associated with making the NFV business case, I’ve gotten a lot of comments from salespeople who are charged with the responsibility of doing that. I’ve tabulated just shy of 30 of these, and…