Last month I laid out a number of points on the network implications of “fog computing”, and now is a good time to take those implications and mix them with vendor positioning and opportunity to judge how well vendors will be able to address the new issues. There are four classes of vendors to look…
I had an interesting exchange with a vendor recently, talking about the future of and leadership in NFV. What made it so interesting was that the vendor echoed a sentiment I’d heard from some operators. His point in essence was that “modernization” was the driver for NFV, that the operators now needed only to prevent…
Many vendors have found hope in NFV opportunity, including network vendors, software vendors, server vendors, and chip vendors. At VMworld the CEOs of Dell and VMware held a kind of NFV love-fest, and Intel has long been promoting NFV for the obvious reason that hosting anything consumes hosts, which consume chips. At the same time…
Rackspace knows a lot about the cloud. Maybe they know more than the pundits do, and very possibly more than the consortium of investors (led by Apollo Global Management) that are taking them private. The question now is whether they know more than those who think that the managed cloud services space is a great,…
There have been a number of online articles recently on the relationship between testing and monitoring and NFV. In the CloudNFV project I headed in 2013 to early 2014, I did some work defining these issues in more detail, and though the results were never incorporated in the PoC they do offer some input on…
If the future is as “foggy” (yes, I mean in the sense of being edge-distributed, not murky!) as I have suggested, and if networks have to be adapted to the mission of “fog-connection”, then how does this impact metro networking explicitly? In particular, would this new mission create opportunities for the optical vendors, and could…
I blogged yesterday about the economics-driven transformation of networking from the data center out. My point was that as operators drive toward greater profits, they first concentrate on higher-layer content and cloud-hosted services, then concentrate these service assets in the metro areas, near the edge. This creates a kind of metro-virtual-data-center structure that users connect…
What does the data center of the future look like? Or the cloud of the future? Are they related, and if so, how? Google has built data centers and global networks in concert, to the point where arguably the two are faces of the same coin. Amazon and Microsoft have built data centers to be…
Everyone is talking about carrier capex, in some sense or another. If you’re a vendor you know that your buyers have been pinching pennies, and if you’re an operator you know that return on infrastructure is threatening your capital plans. The Street has worried about it too, though more for vendors’ profit impact than for…
Everyone probably knows the old story about trying to identify an elephant behind a curtain. If you grab a leg, you think it’s a tree; grab a trunk and it’s a snake. I’ve been reading the stories on 5G for the week, and it’s hard not to believe that we’re back to groping the elephant…