Whatever else you have, or think you have, the NFV business case will depend on software automation of the service lifecycle. VNFs matter functionally, but only if you can operationalize them efficiently and only if they combine to drive carrier-cloud adoption. The core of any justification for NFV deployment in the near term is operational…
If we need to apply advanced cloud principles to virtual network functions (VNFs), what exactly would that mean for VNF design, onboarding, and management? This is an important question because the current VNF onboarding process is broken from the operators’ almost universal perspective. Management, in my own view, is at least as broken. Fixing these…
I hope that convincing you that having NFV evolve in sync with the leading edge of the cloud hasn’t proven too difficult. If it has, then I hope the rest of this series will do the job. If you’re on board, then I hope that the rest gives you a few action items to study. …
When we design a transformation strategy for operators today we’re really designing something to be deployed at scale in perhaps 2020 or 2021. The telco world has the longest capital cycle of any technology sector, with elements that are expected to live for ten years in many cases—sometimes even more. It’s critical for virtualization in…
An article in Light Reading yesterday caught my eye, because it said that a survey of operators showed a lower level of confidence in their meeting virtualization goals. This isn’t a surprise to me, given that my own contact with operators has been saying they had little confidence all along. It does offer some insights…
Amazon has been working hard to make the cloud more than just outsourced server consolidation, and its latest move might be its most significant. They’ve announced a distributed platform (hardware and software) that can extend some important AWS API services to nearly anywhere—not only the data center but potentially anywhere you can run Ubuntu (or…
The announcement that Verizon is truly selling its cloud data centers, we now know to Equinix, has to put fear in the heart of carrier cloud proponents. It should, and it should even call into question the future of NFV. But all is not lost here; the fact is that Verizon was premature in getting…
Anyone used to the SLAs of TDM services knows that SLAs have changed. We used to talk about “error-free seconds”, and now we’re usually talking about monthly uptime. Mobile devices have changed our view on things like call quality—“Can you hear me now?” is almost a classic example of a trend to assign “good” to…
CORD, the new darling of telco transformation using open source, is a great concept and one I’ve supported for ages. I think it’s a necessary condition for effective transformation, but it’s not a sufficient condition. There are two other things we need to look at. The first is what makes up the other carrier-cloud data…
Comcast just joined the ONOS project, and I think that raises an important question about SDN, NFV, and the whole top-down or bottom-up model of transformation. Couple that with the obvious fact that you read less about SDN and NFV these days, and you get a clear signal that something important might be happening. Several…