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…
If you are a company with aspirations in the SDN or NFV markets, then operators themselves say you have a problem. In fact, you probably have more than one problem, and those problems are hurting your ability to engage customers and build revenue. This is a message from those same literati I talked “tech-turkey” with…
From the first, it was (or should have been) clear that NFV was a cloud application. Despite this, we aren’t seeing what should then have been clear signs of technologies and concepts migrating from the cloud space into NFV. One obvious example is TOSCA, the OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications, which has…
The DC Court of Appeals has upheld the FCC’s latest neutrality order, and as is nearly always the case with these regulatory things the move has created a combination of misinformation and apocalyptic warnings. However, it’s always dangerous to think that these regulatory moves are just the usual political jostling. The telecom industry has been…
I am always trying to explore issues that could impact network transformation, especially relating to adopting NFV. NFV offers a potentially radical shift in capex and architecture, after all. I had a couple emails in response to some of my prior blogs that have stimulated me to think of the problem from a different angle. …
Microsoft announced it was acquiring business social network giant LinkedIn and the Street took that as positive for LinkedIn and negative for Microsoft. There are a lot of ways of looking at the deal, including that Microsoft like Verizon wants a piece of the OTT and advertising-sponsored service market. It seems more likely that there’s…
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…