Author: Tom Nolle

There are a lot of illusions in life, and thus not surprisingly in networking.  One of the illusions is that there is great opportunity to be had by generating on-demand high-capacity services.  Another, possibly related to the first, is that there’s a high value to vertically integrating the operation of networks from the service layer…

You generally find revolutionaries in coffee shops, not gourmet dining rooms or private clubs.  In the race for the right to shape the network of the future, the equivalent of a coffee shop is “second-tier” status.  You can see the candy through the window (to mix a metaphor) but can’t quite get at it—unless you…

“The times they are a’changing”, as the song goes.  The pace and direction of the changes could be influenced by vendors agile and determined enough to get out there and take some bold steps.  We’ve looked at the IT giants who have the most to gain from a transition to a software-server vision of networking. …

Over the past several months, I’ve talked about the evolution in networking (some say “revolution” but industries with 10-year capital cycles don’t have those).  Along the way I’ve mentioned vendors who are favored or disadvantaged for various reasons, and opened issues that could help or hurt various players.  Now, I propose to use the last…

Since I’ve blogged recently about the progress (or lack of it!) from proof-of-concept to field trials for SDN and NFV, I’ve gotten some emails from you on just what a “field trial” is about.  I took a look at operator project practices in 2013 as a part of my survey, and there was some interesting…

We at CIMI Corporation wish you all the happiest of holiday seasons and the best for the New Year. Click HERE for our holiday card to you. Tom Nolle President

Last week we had some interesting news on AT&T’s Domain 2.0 program and some announcements in the SDN and NFV space.  As is often the case, there’s an interesting juxtaposition between these events that sheds some light on the evolution of the next-gen network.  In particular, it raises the question of whether either operators or…

“Service agility” or “service velocity” are terms we see more and more every day.  NFV, SDN, and the cloud all rely to a degree—even an increasing degree—on this concept as a primary benefit driver.  There is certainly a reason to believe that in the most general case, service agility is very powerful.  The question is…

If you look at any model of network evolution, including the one I presented for 2020 yesterday in my blog, you find that it involves a shifting of roles between the familiar layers of the OSI model, perhaps even the elimination of certain layers.  That begs the question of how these new layers would cooperate…

One of the interesting issues that I encountered at the HP Discover 2014 event this week was that of “carrier grade”, and I even had someone make a related comment on a prior blog of mine.  For ages, people have talked about how important it was to be “carrier grade” and offer “five-nines” reliability.  NFV…