Author: Tom Nolle

Juniper just completed their SDN event at their partner conference, and as is often the case they haven’t made things easy for those who, like me, are charged with analyzing the result.  But we soldier on, and so let me jump right in. At the high level, Juniper’s SDN strategy is really a Network Functions…

RAD isn’t exactly a household word in SDN, but their CTO did a blog on SDN that raises some interesting points, particularly given that another vendor (Juniper) is scheduled to do an SDN announcement tomorrow. The first point in the RAD blog is that “SDN returns to centralized control as compared to a distributed control…

According to an FT article, EU telcos are mulling over the idea of sharing infrastructure rather than deploying multiple, interconnected, often competitively-overbuilt, national networks.  The move is partially a response to regulatory issues in Europe, where operators believe they are being asked to improve services and lower costs while their own costs are rising.  Some…

Cisco’s Videoscape has been literally everything, both in a positioning sense and in its mission and component count.  Operators griped about the fuzziness of the concept at the first announcement, but there are some signs that Cisco is starting to pull things together, and that could be significant for Cisco, as well as for a…

The buzz with the Consumer Electronics Show is that everything gets to be connected, and that may or may not be a good thing.  It’s not surprising that we’d see a drive to connect; Cisco for example has been pushing it on the theory that anything that creates more traffic sells more routers.  The question…

All the talk about “cloud networking” and “virtual networks” and “software defined networks” seems to be diverging as often as converging, and I’ve talked about the “network model” issues that might be behind a good part of that.  There’s another factor worthy of mention, too, and that’s the perspective issue.  If you’re the cloud looking…

Some of the news bits I saw this week raised an interesting point (to me, at least), which is that they reflected an underlying point that was being overlooked.  So I want to look at them today, and ask “Why is it…..?” The top item is that big Netflix outage over the holidays.  Everyone knows…

Where are we with respect to SDN?  That’s a question a lot of people are asking, and that a lot of vendors are watching.  The answer, at least according to my survey this fall, is “We don’t know”, and that’s an important point to consider if you want to understand what might happen in the…

We’re at the end of 2012, a year many of us will remember less than fondly if for no other reason the politico/economic foibles in both the US and Europe.  Call it “The Year of Class Warfare” if you like, economically speaking.  We should also remember it as a very important transitional year, and if…

Light Reading is asking the question “Where is SDN Going?” today (http://www.lightreading.com/blog.asp?blog_sectionid=388&doc_id=228144&) and I’d like to propose we ask a broader question, which is “Where is the network going?” as we wind down 2012.  The reason is that SDN is a network trend being driven by network forces, and you have to get to the…