I had an interesting exchange with a planner in a mid-sized carrier, and got some insight into how network operators are seeing SDN. Coming from an exchange with some other operators, my contact gave me a tutorial on the “models” of deployment the operators are seeing as promising. Some are familiar, and some approaches we…
VNFs, meaning virtual network functions, are important to NFV. Without them there’s no possible business justification to be had, no matter how good our infrastructure or orchestration and management might be. Well, we all know there are supposed to be five stages of grief. I contend that there are five stages of VNF too, and…
I said in a comment on an earlier blog that I thought all the IoT approaches touted so far were irrational. In earlier blogs I’ve noted my view that IoT had to be viewed more as a big-data application than as a network. A few of you have asked me to expand on my own…
In prior blogs I looked at the NFV deployment model and the way that management as ETSI defined it would presumably work within a “typical” deployment. The question this last of my more detailed explorations of NFV management will deal with is how “NFV management” relates to management and operations in a broader sense. You…
NFV is turning out to be a lot more complicated than it first appeared, and that’s particularly true in the area most critical to vendors—the business case. While the question of making a broad business case for NFV is weeding out a lot of secondary players, it’s not deciding a market leader yet. In fact,…
Hopefully your interest in NFV management prompted you to read yesterday’s blog and you’re ready to follow up. If not, you may want to review it before you read this one because I’m building on the last one with only a very brief level-set! Let’s assume we have a VNF with four components, one of…
NFV management has never been my favorite part of NFV, and I’ve groused about it here fairly regularly. It’s probably time to talk about the issues in more detail, and so I’m going to do an as-yet-undetermined number of blogs in a series about the issue. To get this straight, we have to set the…
Since the dual United Airlines and NYSE outages I’ve gotten a lot of email about the stability of new network architectures. While I don’t have any special insight into those incidents and so can’t (and won’t) speculate on how they were caused or how they could be prevented, I do have some experience with network…
One of the ironies of NFV is that its greatest success may be coming from deployments that are actually not NFV at all. A part of this is due to normal market dynamics; you always try to pick the low apples first. Another part is due to the scope limitations I’ve blogged about before; holistic…
Alcatel-Lucent has collected a number of important NFV deals recently. The company won a pair in China (China Mobile and China Unicom) and also won an expanded deal with European innovator Telefonica. There seems to be a common element in these deals—voice services and mobility. I think that says a lot about NFV and how…