Author: Tom Nolle

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…

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…