The battle for public cloud supremacy is far from over, but it may be taking a new direction. Amazon has announced its Snowball edge appliance, which some characterize as an extension of the early Greengrass technology that let users run AWS elements on premises, meaning at the edge. This comes as Microsoft is expected to…
The story that Amazon is looking to get into the white box switch business is probably true at some level. Perhaps they really want to sell them, or perhaps they’re simply looking to design their own hardware for their cloud data centers. In either case, it should indeed make the network vendors who rely on…
We looked at clouds from both sides, so the song says, and we probably need to do that with “logical networking” too. From the bottom, SD-WAN is a simple way of extending VPNs, but from the top it’s different. I’ve said in many past blogs that SD-WAN was the on-ramp to a new logical networking…
Suppose that we were able to find a role for standards in a software-defined world. What would that role be? I think it’s obvious that traditional standards processes are simply not effective in the current age. They take way too long and they end up defining an architecture that has to be ignored if the…
Everyone probably agrees that broadband Internet is the revolution of our time. Whether we’re talking about wireline or wireless, even business versus consumer, the explosive growth of broadband access to the Internet has transformed much of telecom. What we used to think of as the prime services (voice calling) is now an afterthought OTT service. …
You probably know how fond I am of classic quotations. One I’ve always particularly liked is in Latin: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes”, which translates freely to “who will watch the guards themselves?” We might be heading for a knock-off of that in zero-touch automation (ZTA). How do you like “who will orchestrate the orchestrators themselves?”…
What’s in a name? Too much, in many cases, because we tend to use a single very popular name (one with good media visibility) to cover a product space that may have little in the way of uniform features or even missions. We clearly have that problem with SD-WAN. Scott Raynovich did a nice piece…
I’m Tom Nolle, the author of CIMI Corporation’s blog and the president of CIMI Corp. I’ve been asked from time to time how someone can register to comment on the blog posts, and I want to answer that here. You cannot reply on the blog; comments are disabled and will remain so. All the blog…
Sometimes it seems like industry consortia have longer lives than the stuff they work on. Part of that is because the smarter ones keep moving to keep pace with industry needs and media interest. The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is reinventing itself, launching a new strategic plan, and if you combine this with some of…
Since we are pretty much done with 5G standards, it’s a good time to take a realistic look at the way 5G might actually deploy and how it might impact metro infrastructure and the carrier cloud. I want to stress that operators are internally divided on 5G and its impacts, so I’ve necessarily had to…