Author: Tom Nolle

I’ve done a couple of blogs on SDN topics, but one of the important questions facing everyone who’s considering SDN is how it would fit in the context of NFV.  For network operators, NFV may well be the senior partner issue-wise, since NFV is explicitly aimed at improving capital efficiency, service agility, and operations efficiency…

The Service Architect Lifecycle tutorial I just completed for ExperiaSphere taught me a lot about management and orchestration for SDN, NFV, and the cloud.  There’s nothing like having to explain how something would be used to focus your attention on what needs to be done!  I don’t want to dive into all the issues, which…

Sometimes it seems like companies miss the simplest truths.  A market, over time, has to either change or stay the same, right?  Why then do we seem to have a problem accepting that in the networking space?  We presume change and static markets, seemingly, at the same time.  Juniper’s recent quarter, and the steps the…

IBM and Google both reported their quarterly numbers, with both companies beating on the revenue line but short on profits.  The markets this morning took disconnected view; IBM’s shares were off pre-market and Google was up, though both movements were modest. Google’s revenues beat slightly, with decent guidance, and this is probably what the Street…

We have a couple of important developments on the business side of networking that taken together could signal something significant—but not unexpected.  Intel reported numbers that were just consistently good, and Apple and IBM are entering into a mobility partnership.  The common thread offers some insight into what’s really happening with the cloud, the PC,…

Over the last year, we’ve seen a significant transition in expectations for things like SDN and NFV that are aimed at transforming networks.  Where once it was believed that moving to white-box switches and functionality hosted on cheap servers was a major driver of change, it’s now broadly accepted that something else has to drive…

Everyone surely knows the old saw about the difficulty in pushing spaghetti uphill, and it occurs to me that we’re in danger of trying to do something very like that with changes created by SDN and NFV, perhaps even the cloud.  The expression is usually applied to tasks that are made difficult not by the…

According to a decent interview/story in Light Reading, Broadcom has an NFV strategy (no surprise) and it’s one that favors the notion of a hybrid technology approach, augmenting COTS with specialized technology to enhance performance (no surprise there either; they make the stuff).  But just because you’re opportunistic doesn’t mean you’re wrong, and there are…

In the hype-ridden NFV space, Metaswitch has always stood out for me as a voice of both reason and experience.  As the founder of the Project Clearwater open-source IMS project, they’re knowledgeable about cloud-based carrier functionality and open-source at the same time.  As a member of the CloudNFV™ group they are one of the few…

Credit Suisse has some interesting data on the data center switching market, and I think it’s particularly interesting when you look at in light of the overall weakness in IT spending that Gartner previously reported.  It also raises some points about SDN evolution and what can be expected there. First, the data center is the…