Author: Tom Nolle

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,…

I guess that like many out there, I regard Cisco announcements with a mixture of interest and cynicism.  I remember well the times when Cisco would announce a “five-phase strategy” that was (whatever the technology focus) always something that they were already in Phase Two of and never something that was actually delivered in “Phase…

I’ve commented in a number of my blogs that the standards process for both SDN and NFV have failed to address their respective issues to full effect.  The result is that we’re not thinking about either technology in the optimum way, and are at risk for under-shooting the opportunities both could generate.  There are some…

The end game for any new technology is deployment based on business value, and I’ve noted many times that the biggest challenge faced by NFV is getting out of the lab and into the network.  That’s now starting to happen, at least as a small step, through a Masergy service called Virtual f(n).  It’s not…

SDN and NFV security are issues that rank high with network operators and users, but “security” is an issue that ranks high with everyone and ranking doesn’t always equate with rational action.  Of 48 operators I’ve talked with over the last six months, all place SDN and NFV security among their top three issues.  Enterprises,…