Somebody told me last week that network virtualization was well underway, which surprised me because I don’t think it’s really even begun. The difference in view lies in two factors—is “acceptance” equivalent to deployment and is a different way of doing the same thing the same as doing something different. The issue we have with…
You all probably know how I love blog topics that present a contrast, and today we have a nice opportunity for one with the quarterly results from IBM and Juniper. The former disappointed the Street and the latter made them happy. The former has touted transition and the latter seems to be staying the course. …
Dell’s decision to acquire EMC has raised a lot of questions among fans of both companies, and there’s certainly a new competitive dynamic in play with the move. The most dramatic aspect of the deal might turn out to be the impact it has on the cloud, SDN, and NFV positioning of the combined company. …
OpenStack has been seen by most as an essential element in any NFV solution, but lately there have been questions raised on whether OpenStack can meet the grade, meaning “carrier-grade” or “five-nines”. Light Reading did an article on this, and Stratus recently published an NFV PoC that they say proves that OpenStack VIM mechanisms are…
One of the things that came out of Light Reading’s NFV Everywhere event was a sense that the critical MANO element of NFV has somehow lost its luster. There have been some articles on that topic, and one of the most active members of the NFV ISG has posted a blog as well. IMHO, the…
According to a recent piece on SDxCentral, “Operators don’t want the TM Forum to get lost in NFV technicalities. They want the focus on making money.” That’s an interesting and insightful couple of sentences, for several reasons, and it may be a signal of a sea change in NFV. The obvious question is who’s going…
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…