We all know the phrase “You can’t get there from here.” It’s a joke to illustrate that there are some logical destinations that don’t have any realistic migration path. Some wonder whether a new network model of any kind, whether it’s white-box-and-OpenFlow, hosted routing, or NFV, is practical because of the migration difficulties. Operators themselves…
Every change you make to a network changes how you look at is. That changes what you look at it with, meaning the technologies, tools, and practices involved in monitoring and testing. Networks are a cooperative association of devices, coordinated in some way to fit a specific mission. Getting them to do that, or determining…
Open feature software and hardware platforms for devices could revolutionize networking, at many levels. I blogged about the service impacts earlier, so now it’s time to look at what could happen to the industry overall. I think everyone understands that the changes would be radical, but not universal. Even in the vendor space, there could…
What would an open networking model really mean? I don’t mean from the perspective of the finances of operators or vendors (that’s obvious at the high level, and complicated enough to warrant a special blog at a lower level). We need to think about what would happen to networks and services if operators had open…
Revolutions have to unite before they can disrupt. A bunch of isolated dissidents can’t really hope to do much except create a higher local noise level, but a united crowd can move a society—or in our case, an industry. Telecom is undergoing a revolution right now, created by the irresistible force of falling operator profit…
Blockchain is another of the modern topics that seems to have a life of its own. The problem is that about half the people who think of blockchain don’t really know what it is, and the other half think it’s all about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. The application doesn’t define the technology, or at least it…
The media headline was something like “Oracle rains on the cloud.” Catchy, but is it true? Oracle turned in some worse-than-expected results despite a fairly aggressive stance on cloud computing. Is there an Oracle execution problem, a cloud computing problem, or just a company missing its numbers? We’ll have to dig a bit to see….
In the last week, I’ve done a couple of blogs mentioning P4. It should be clear that I’m a fan of the concept, but I want to point out that P4 is (like many other tech developments) at risk for being overhyped. Does it, as SDxCentral says, “take[s] software-defined networking (SDN) to the next level”? …
One of the big issues in zero-touch automation is event generation. Since management of services and infrastructure is all about responding to events, it’s pretty logical that getting events to respond to is critical, fundamental. It’s not so much that we don’t know how to generate events, as that we don’t necessarily know how to…
If software defines everything, is everything converging? Obviously not, but some software-defined things probably are converging, and there’s no better example than that offered by SDN and SD-WAN. The big questions raised by that convergence are what emerges in the way of a combined model, and what group of vendors/supporters wins in the mash-up. Will…