Competition among vendors always generates interesting changes, and we may be seeing some more interesting than usual with the announcements of Red Hat and VMware/Dell over the last week or so. Not only is there the usual tension among competitive products, but this time some tension between a vendor who offers open-source software platforms and…
I don’t think NFV will ever be what its proponents hope it will be, but I do think it can be better. Here’s the big question that the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) initiative has to answer. This is a cloud project, so why not simply adopt cloud technology? That didn’t happen, so we have to…
Is there a new model for telco transformation? According to a Fierce Telecom piece, there may be, and the details in the article match very well with what I’ve been reporting from my own contacts with network operators. The big question may be where this new model will take us, and what vendors, bodies, and…
Virtualization has been around for a long time, and sometimes the pace of its advance has seemed dizzying. The truth is that it’s probably just getting started, and so it’s important to look a little at where we came from and what’s new, to try to get a hint of what’s going to be even…
We’ve all heard the talk about automation and opex reduction as means of improving both service and revenue per bit. Part of the implicit goals in increasing operational efficiency is a shifting of some tasks to an automated form, but a bigger part has to come from shifting customer care responsibility more directly and efficiently…
As I’m sure regular readers of this blog know, I don’t really like where the NFV ISG is today. I do like some of the places it’s been. One place is the notion of a kind of modular virtual infrastructure. The concept of “virtual infrastructure” and its management (via, to no surprise, a VIM) has…
The first explicit example of how logical networking could change everything just came along. VMware announced its own approach to that goal with Virtual Cloud Network, and it also demonstrates that SDN can be a player in logical networking as much as SD-WAN. In fact, the speed at which VMware has jumped into the space…
Suppose we do see edge computing. What exactly do we end up seeing? Is edge hosting just like cloud hosting, does it perhaps tilt a bit toward feature hosting or event processing? If so, is the architecture needed, both hardware and software, likely to be different? These are important questions for vendors, but no less…
Everyone is fascinated by the relationship between 5G and edge computing. What’s perhaps the most fascinating thing about it is that we don’t really have much of a notion of how that relationship works, or even if it’s real. 5G is a technological evolution of wireless. Edge computing is a technological evolution of the cloud. …
What is the most important development in networking, not just technology but in the broadest sense? What’s going to change, shape the future? It’s the emergence of “logical networking” as what’s essentially a new OSI layer. That single force is going to reshape everything, decide the fate of the new technologies, and define the role…