Complexity is often the enemy of revolution because things that are simple enough to grasp quickly get better coverage and wider appreciation. A good example is the way we talk about hosting virtual service elements on “COTS” meaning “commercial off-the-shelf-servers”. From the term and its usage, you’d think there was a single model of server,…
The dominant compute model of today is based on the IBM PC, a system whose base configuration when announced didn’t even include floppy disk drives. It would seem that all the changes in computing and networking would drive a different approach, right? Well, about eight years ago, HPE (then HP Labs) proposed what it called…
All too often in technology, we see concepts with real possibilities go stupid on us. Lately many of the key concepts have doubled down on stupidness, departing so far from relevant market benefits that there’s little hope of success. IoT, probably the most hyped of all technology concepts in recent times, has surely had its…
One of the important issues of multi-layer networking, and in fact multi-layer infrastructure, is how things at the top percolate down to the bottom. Any kind of higher-layer service depends on lower-layer resources, and how these resources are committed or released is an important factor under any circumstances. If the agility of lower layers increases,…
In my blog yesterday I talked about service modeling, and it should be clear from the details I covered that lifecycle management, service automation, and event handling are critical pieces to NFV. The service model ties these elements together, but the elements themselves are also important. I want to talk a bit more about them…
The question of how services are modeled is fundamental to how services can be orchestrated and how service-lifecycle processes can be automated. Most people probably agree with these points, but not everyone has thought through the fact that if modeling is at the top of the heap, logically, then getting it right is critical. A…
In the fall of 2013 I had a meeting with five Tier One operators to discuss what was needed to make NFV work. At the meeting, one of the key figures in the NFV ISG and a representative of a big operator made two comments I think are critical and have stood the test of…
Some examples of the operator architecture for SDN and NFV networks have been out for a couple weeks or more. We’re now starting to hear more about vendor changes and even a bit more about the conditions in the marketplace. I’ve certainly been hearing plenty, and so I want to provide a status report. It…
How personal should a network be? The vast majority of things I could find on the Internet, I never want to see. The vast majority of people who could reach me, or who could reach, are those I never want to talk with. Enterprises tell me that the great majority of the possible user-to-application or…
Brocade did an interesting paper on the topic of digital transformation, something you’ll recall was also a fixture of the Netcracker launch of its Agile Virtualization Platform. Reading it, it occurred to me that the concept of “digital transformation” is widely accepted and not usefully defined. That was one of my conclusions on the Netcracker…