One of the persistent challenges SDN and NFV have faced is the conflict between their “revolutionary” label and the pedestrian applications that tend to come to light. While there’s much new and different that could be done with either technology, most of what is done looks an awful lot like what you could do with…
SDN and NFV security are issues that rank high with network operators and users, but “security” is an issue that ranks high with everyone and ranking doesn’t always equate with rational action. Of 48 operators I’ve talked with over the last six months, all place SDN and NFV security among their top three issues. Enterprises,…
The impact of SDN and NFV on OSS/BSS is a topic that obsesses many operators and also a topic I’ve blogged about extensively. There’s no question it’s important, but there’s another kind of operations too—network operations. It’s not always obvious, but both SDN and NFV would have profound impacts on network operations and the operations…
I had an interesting exchange with a big national carrier on the subject of management integration and unified modeling of services. I’ve noted in past blogs that I was a fan of having a unified service model, something that described everything from the tip-top retail experience to the lowest-level deployment. I pointed out that such…
Oracle reported their numbers on Wednesday, and the results weren’t pretty by Street standards. The company missed pretty much across the board, and in particular in Europe. Oracle blamed foreign exchange for much of their problem, but the general financial-industry consensus is that it’s deeper than that, including dragging hardware, poor execution, and perhaps a…
I’ve blogged now about “edge-based” and “interior” NFV service opportunities, and in the latter I noted that I was going to treat the case of “interior nodes” separately. Many of you will probably understand why that is the case, but I hope to show everyone why nodal services are different, and perhaps generate some discussion…
I blogged yesterday about the vCPE model of services, talking both about its role in NFV and how it might have a life outside/beyond NFV. Some of you were interested in what might be said about other new service models, and in particular how “interior” rather than edge models could work. My information on this…
Virtual CPE (vCPE) is one of the hotter topics these days, and even though it has its roots in NFV the concept seems to be taking some tottering steps on its own. As it does, it may be exposing some evolutionary trends that could supplement or replace aspects of the NFV value proposition, and even…
For those who, like me, find the current NFV activity diffused and missing the point more often than not, the prospect of yet another body with their fingers in the pie stirs mixed emotions. The New IP Agency (NIA) was launched at the Light Reading Big Telecom Event last week with (according to the group)…
NFV is going to require deploying VNFs on something; the spec calls the resource pool to be used “NFV Infrastructure” or NFVI. Obviously most NFVI is going to be data centers and servers and switches, but not all of it, and even where the expected data centers are deployed there’s the question of how many,…