Author: Tom Nolle

I talked in my last blog about intent modeling in NFV, and today I want to look at extending intent modeling in two directions—into SDN (which is easy) and into management (which is less than easy).  I’m not going to recap the theory of intent models beyond a sentence, so if you didn’t read yesterday’s…

Sometimes our technologies are more defined by the stories told about them than about their realities.  SDN and NFV are no exceptions, and the full scope of mythology for either would take a lot more than a single article to cover.  Fortunately we can narrow the scope of myths (and blogs) by focusing on what…

If SDN and NFV are going to create market waves, the obvious question is whether vendors are going to ride them or be swept away.  Given the immature state of both technologies, there’s not a lot of clear indicators to read on that topic, but there do seem to be a few signposts emerging from…

The notion that things are changing, perhaps a bit too fast for comfort, is hardly a modern phenomenon nor one confined to tech.  One of my favorite poems (Arthur Guieterman’s On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness) starts with the provocative line “The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls of mastodons…are billiard balls.”  Change, and not…

VNFs, meaning virtual network functions, are important to NFV.  Without them there’s no possible business justification to be had, no matter how good our infrastructure or orchestration and management might be.  Well, we all know there are supposed to be five stages of grief.  I contend that there are five stages of VNF too, and…

I said in a comment on an earlier blog that I thought all the IoT approaches touted so far were irrational.  In earlier blogs I’ve noted my view that IoT had to be viewed more as a big-data application than as a network.  A few of you have asked me to expand on my own…

NFV is turning out to be a lot more complicated than it first appeared, and that’s particularly true in the area most critical to vendors—the business case.  While the question of making a broad business case for NFV is weeding out a lot of secondary players, it’s not deciding a market leader yet.  In fact,…

NFV management has never been my favorite part of NFV, and I’ve groused about it here fairly regularly.  It’s probably time to talk about the issues in more detail, and so I’m going to do an as-yet-undetermined number of blogs in a series about the issue. To get this straight, we have to set the…

One of the ironies of NFV is that its greatest success may be coming from deployments that are actually not NFV at all.  A part of this is due to normal market dynamics; you always try to pick the low apples first.  Another part is due to the scope limitations I’ve blogged about before; holistic…

In the idealistic vision of the future network (a vision I still hope can be realized), NFV forms an operational- and feature-enhancing umbrella over SDN to create agile services that improve efficiency and add greater value than the basic connection services of today.  This vision would require some significant expansions in scope for NFV; primarily,…