Author: Tom Nolle

I blogged a year ago that optimum implementation of NFV could create between 80,000 and 130,000 new data centers, making NFV potentially the largest source of new server and data center component installations.  There is little doubt that NFV could touch every aspect of virtually every service, so there’s lots of reasons for operators to…

Cisco has for years been two companies—one that generated most of the revenue but was focused on the clearly threatened switching/routing space, and another that aimed at high-flying and largely unproven opportunities in “emerging technologies”.  The difference has been stark enough that Street activists have called for a breakup of Cisco so the speculative urges…

Of all the components called out in the ETSI NFV E2E architecture, it may be that the most important is the VNF Manager or VNFM.  As the dialog on NFV advanced, there’s been a shift of benefit focus from savings in capex to improvements in operations efficiency and service agility.  In addition, the reliability, availability,…

Alcatel-Lucent announced last week that it was getting into the virtual router business, and at the same time announced an evolution to their Nuage SDN platform strategy.  The Nuage stuff it good; some of what they did is what Alcatel-Lucent and others should have done from the first with SDN.  Some of it also creates…

The media is all agog over the decision by the President to endorse a path to neutrality that would include reclassifying ISP services as Title II, meaning making the ISPs common carriers in terms of the Telecom Act.  I’ve read that it means the ISPs would become public utilities, or that they’d then have to…

An industry is an ecosystem, a cooperative economic unit that shows its directions and signals its changes in many ways, through many channels.  Today we have a set of signals that add up to something very interesting, very disturbing to many. Cisco reported their numbers, which the Street characterized as “solid” but with “disappointing guidance”. …

Juniper has followed the lead of competitors Brocade and Cisco in launching a virtual router product.  Their press release on this was refreshingly entertaining, offering the announcement in the context of an example of what it might do.  The only problem is that Juniper hasn’t really done anything more than either Cisco or Brocade in…

SDN and NFV have been media events for sure, like the cloud.  But like the cloud, SDN and NFV are technology revolutions that require both the technology part (the right architectures and elements) and some revolutionaries.  We’ve been sadly lacking in both, but that may now be changing.  Two of the most credible of all…

Last week, and in prior blogs, I mentioned the fact that virtual network functions (VNFs) have to be recipients of NFV services, and that the sum of these services may determine the ease with which current network code could migrate to become VNFs.  It’s also a determinant in the portability of VNFs across multiple platforms,…

A couple of you dropped me an email after my last blog and expressed an interest in hearing more about what I’d described as “functional” versus “structural” orchestration in NFV and even related technologies (SDN and the cloud).  OK, here goes. If we start with the service example I gave in yesterday’s blog, we can…