In my last blog I pointed out that we really needed to understand what the end-game network would look like to effectively drive SDN and NFV. Today I’d like to look at how the possible end-games relate to the vendors in the game. Who might win, or even drive, a specific SDN/NFV future? There seem…
OK, I admit to liking old songs and poetry, so you’ll probably not be surprised if I quote a song title; “How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?” I don’t propose to blog on oceans or skies here, but depth and breadth is an interesting question posed to SDN and NFV. We…
Yesterday, Brocade announced enhancements to its SDN Controller that advanced SDN in an operations sense. I think these were important; they move SDN toward the architecture it should have been from the first. They also show us just how far SDN still has to go for it to achieve all it can. What Brocade has…
SDN came along well before NFV, and there are many SDN implementations compared with “real” (meaning actually complete and useful) NFV. Despite this, SDN became a bit of a junior partner to NFV at least among network operators. Even in my own deployment models, it’s clear that the easiest path to SDN deployment would be…
I got over a hundred emails after my series on making the business case for NFV. A few didn’t like it (all of these were from the vendor community) but most who contacted me either wanted to say it was helpful or ask for a bit more detail on the process. OK, here goes. You…
NFV is going to succeed, if we define success as having some level of deployment. What’s less certain is whether it will succeed optimally, meaning reach its full potential. For that to happen, NFV has to be able to deliver both operations efficiency and service agility on a scale large enough to impact operators’ revenue/cost…
I think that most of my readers realize by now that I think the data modeling associated with NFV is absolutely critical for its success. Sadly, few of the players involved in NFV say much about their approach to the models, and I’ve not been able to get the same level of detail from all…
When I was a newly-minted programmer I saw a cartoon in the Saturday Evening Post (yes, it was a long time ago!) A programmer came home from the office, tossed his briefcase on the sofa, and said to his wife “I made a mistake today that would have taken a thousand mathematicians a hundred years…
In a number of recent blogs I’ve talked about the critical value of intent modeling to NFV. I’d like to extend that notion to the management plane, and show how intent modeling could bridge NFV, network management, and service operations automation into a single (hopefully glorious) whole. In the network age, management has always had…
Everyone knows what MANO means to NFV and many know what NFVI is, but even those who know what “VIM” stands for (Virtual Infrastructure Manager) may not have thought through the role that component plays and how variations on implementation could impact NFV deployment. There are a lot of dimensions to the notion, and all…