Author: Tom Nolle

I had a couple of very interesting discussions recently on SDN, and they point out what I think might be the emerging key issue for the whole concept.  That issue is whether SDN is about services or about protocols, and it’s been framed to me recently by discussions on the evolution of OpenDaylight. The central…

Cisco has long been an advocate of what I like to call “Chicken-Little” marketing; you run around yelling that the traffic sky is falling and expect operators to accept sub-par ROIs to do their part in addressing the issue.  Their “Internet of Everything” story has always had elements of that angle, but it’s also been…

Some time ago, the Linux Foundation in cooperation with the NFV ISG launched an initiative (Open Platform for NFV, or OPN) aimed at implementing the NFV specifications.  OpenStack has now launched a “Team” that has the same goals.  It’s not unusual for multiple groups to aim at the same target these days, both in standards…

One of the things about hot trends that my surveys tell me frustrates users is the tendency to talk about something but never really define it properly or explain how it would work.  We’ve all seen that with things like SDN and NFV.  It doesn’t have to be one of the super-revolution trends either; I’ve…

It’s hard not to see the VMworld show as anything other than a VMware-versus-Cisco extravaganza, partly of course because that’s how it tends to be portrayed in coverage.  Underneath, there is surely good reason to see the networking developments in particular as being contra-Cisco, but I wonder whether there’s more to it.  Cisco might be…

There’s a popular view that as we move into the future, operators will build networks from commodity/commercial off-the-shelf servers (COTS) rather than specialized network equipment.  Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is the poster child for the notion, and there have been a flood of announcements from vendors who have made hosted network functionality available under the…

HP reported its results and the numbers were favorable overall, with the company delivering year-over-year revenue growth for the first time in three years.  The only fly in this sweet ointment was that the great majority of the gains came in the PC division, which saw a 12% increase in revenue that management attributes to…

Yesterday I talked about the views of a particular operator on NFV trials and evolution, based on a conversation with a very knowledgeable tech guru there.  That same guru is heavily involved in SDN evolution and it’s worthwhile to explore the operator’s SDN progress and directions. A good place to start is with the focus…

Networking has, for decades, seemed to advance based on changes in how we do stuff.  We progressed from TDM to packet, from SNA to IP in business networks, and now we’re moving (so they say) from legacy IP and Ethernet to SDN and NFV and from electrical to optical.  Underneath this seeming consistency is an…

Anyone who believes in “cyclical spending” or “refresh cycles” or “secular recovery” in tech should take another look at the numbers after both Cisco and IBM reported yesterday.  We are obviously in a general economic recovery and yet tech is stagnant.  As it happens, though, the same two companies’ reports offer some insights into what…