The relationship between SDN and NFV has always been complicated and often a bit competitive. SDN had an early lead for mindshare and vendor support but NFV captured the media’s attention quickly and today it seems to be leading in the field of strategic interest to operators. However, nearly all the operators I’ve talked with…
All of the discussions of service modeling and management or operations integration that I’ve recently had beg the question of OSS/BSS modernization. This is a topic that’s as contentious as that of infrastructure evolution, but it involves a different set of players in both the buyer and seller organizations. Since operations practices and costs will…
I said in my last blog that starting from the top of in viewing next-gen services and infrastructure led to a refinement of operator-sponsored models for SDN/NFV deployment. In that blog, I took the process down to what I said was the critical point—the “Network Function” that replaces the TMF concept of a “Resource-Facing Service”…
We now have a number of public or semi-public operator architectures for their next-gen networks, and we’ve had semi-public vendor architectures for some time. The “semi-“ qualifier here means that there are a number in both spaces that are not explicitly NDA, but are nevertheless not particularly well described. We also have a number of…
Software-defined networking has a lot of potential, but we’ve learned in our industry that vague potential doesn’t create a revolution. More important than potential are the specific places where network operators see SDN creating a significant shift in capex. There’s still a lot of variation to contend with regarding exactly how soon these places will…
Comcast’s announcement on buying a big chunk of the software assets of Icontrol (already used by Comcast in Xfinity’s home control) is another possible sign that the IoT space is getting sensible. In fact, it’s two signs in one deal, and these could reinforce the trend toward a logical model of IoT that I blogged…
I blogged recently on the views of the “literati” of network operator planning for NFV, and one blog dealt with what they thought vendors were doing wrong. Yesterday, Ray Le Maistre from Light Reading did a video piece on the OPNFV event and made one of the same points. The literati said that vendors don’t…
Earlier this week in my blog I talked about a model-driven open approach to NFV that focused on deployment elements, meaning infrastructure. I introduced the notion of virtual function classes as the framework for VNF openness too, and I want to follow up on that today. The general point of my earlier blog was that…
What operators want most from their next-gen infrastructure (whether SDN or NFV or the cloud) is openness. They feel, with some justification, that equipment vendors want to lock them in and force them down migration paths that help the vendor and compromise operator goals. Networks in the past, built on long-established standards that defined the…
Software-defined WAN is one of those terms that’s vague enough to be applicable to a lot of things, but the core reality is a fairly classic “overlay model” of networking. An overlay network is a layer on top of the “network protocol” of a real network, an overlay that provides the connectivity service to the…