Arista’s quarterly results might be showing us something important about the evolution of networking. The company reported stronger-than-expected revenue, but what surprised many on the Street and in the media was the comment that white-box switching wasn’t seen as competition. That might even be why revenues were better than expected, I think. I also think…
Of all the suppliers (or even alleged suppliers) of NFV, the one who has shown the greatest and fastest gain in credibility is Oracle. Over the last year they’ve jumped from almost-nonentity status to one of the three firms most likely to be called a “market leader” and “thought leader” by operators (Alcatel-Lucent and HP…
Does the Street have it right when they say NFV could hurt Cisco? A Barron’s blog suggests that SDN doesn’t pose much of a threat to Cisco but NFV does, citing a financial analyst’s report. The perspective of Wall Street on tech is sometimes helpful because it exposes the issues that could drive stock prices. …
As an industry, networking has always been very dependent on standards. One big reason is the desire of operators (like all buyers) to avoid vendor lock-in. Standards tend to help make boxes interchangeable, which reduces vendors’ power to control modernization and evolution. SDN and NFV are “standards-based” technologies, so you might think they’d continue this…
The question of how to secure SDN and NFV comes up all the time, and in my view it’s yet to be fully resolved. I think we’re trying to achieve “security by dissection”, meaning that we look at things like VNFs or NFV Infrastructure and ask how to secure them. Yes, you have to build…
I’ve talked in the last two blogs about how intent modeling fits the way that SDN and NFV have to work, and also a bit about its relationship with OSS/BSS, TMF, and the ETSI models. Today I’d like to close this series of blogs with a discussion of intent modeling and orchestration. As it happens,…
I talked in my last blog about intent modeling in NFV, and today I want to look at extending intent modeling in two directions—into SDN (which is easy) and into management (which is less than easy). I’m not going to recap the theory of intent models beyond a sentence, so if you didn’t read yesterday’s…
A piece of good news on the NFV front is that the ETSI ISG is moving toward consideration of intent modeling as the basis for a number of important interfaces. I’ve been advocating intent modeling for several years now, so obviously I’m pleased with the move. You should be too, and everyone else in both…
Sometimes our technologies are more defined by the stories told about them than about their realities. SDN and NFV are no exceptions, and the full scope of mythology for either would take a lot more than a single article to cover. Fortunately we can narrow the scope of myths (and blogs) by focusing on what…
SDN and NFV are going to change infrastructure policy, if they succeed. I’ve blogged about that before. They’ll also likely change the services offered by operators. The notion of service agility as a benefit demands something to jump from (which we have; the present) and to (what we’d have to define). I’d like to think…