One of the positive signs emerging from the ETSI NFV ISG is recent interest in multiple orchestration layers. The notion of a “split orchestration” model that separates traditional NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) from “resource orchestration” could be a powerful enhancement to the basic NFV mode, and perhaps even a step toward embracing a full…
How can it happen? You hear today that a power failure in Delta Airlines’ Atlanta hub put their systems down for an extended period of time. Obviously all of the Delta problems weren’t ongoing IT problems; once you mess up a ballet like airline flight and crew scheduling it’s hard to get everyone dancing in…
In a number of my past blogs, I’ve talked about the value of an event-driven model for cloud and NFV deployment. Since then I’ve gotten a few requests to explain just what the difference is between traditional and event-based models. It’s a challenge to do that without dipping deeply into programming details, but I’m going…
Despite all the hype around Google Fiber, the fact is that getting fiber to the premises (FTTP) is a major economic challenge. While everyone wants fast Internet, nobody really wants to pay for it, and with the Internet (unlike, say, the auto industry) there’s a deep-seated public perception that somehow what they want should be…
Sometimes it’s useful to take an extreme case, a kind of end-game view, to gain insight into how a technology shift might be happening and what it might mean to the rest of the tech world. I’ve said several times in this blog that the cloud, to be truly revolutionary, had to be more than…
Yesterday, I suggested that the tech giant of the future had to be built around a virtual networking portfolio. I was aiming the comments at “tech giant” companies and specifically at how the companies should reorder their assets to match the needs of the cloud era. I’d like to dig a bit deeper into that…
I noted in an earlier blog that some of the tech giants seemed to be shedding parts of their businesses, parts that would at one time have been considered strongly symbiotic or even critical. Credit Suisse has just suggested that HPE would be worth more to shareholders if it broke itself up and sold off…
It should be clear by now that network operators are facing a profit-margin problem on basic connection services. Everyone has been happy to offer advice; vendors think operators should either accept declining margins or address them in some way that doesn’t impact capex. The media thinks the operators should elevate their revenues and practices, become…
I think most people would agree that there is a fusion between cloud computing, virtual networking, and NFV. I think it’s deeper than that. The future of both network infrastructure and computing depends on our harmonizing all that stuff into a single trend. Even Google, who is probably as far along as anyone on this…
The news that Google has joined the CORD (“Central Office Re-Architected as a Data Center”) project, and that the project is now independent under the Linux foundation, is good news for next-gen networks. I’ve always thought CORD was important because it describes what operators would face in an infrastructure transformation—a massive shift in data center…