Studies are always a good thing, and we have one now that could be particularly good for the industry. Working with AD Little, Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs cooperated to generate a report (registration required) that outlines the benefits to be expected from SDN/NFV adoption. There’s good news and bad in the report, at least from the…
Pretty much everything these days is based on networking and software, which by current standards means that everything is SDN. The trend to wash stuff with terms like SDN and NFV is so pervasive that you almost have to ignore it at least at first to get to the reality of the announcement. So it…
We know we need to have security and compliance in SDN and NFV, simply because we have them today in other technologies. We also know, in at least a loose sense, that the same sort of processes that secure legacy technology could also secure SDN and NFV. The challenge, I think, is in making “security”…
Both SDN and NFV deal with virtualization, with abstractions realized by instantiating something on real infrastructure. Both have management issues that stem from those factors, which means that they share many of the same management problems. Formalistically speaking neither SDN nor NFV seem to be solving their problems, but there are signs that some of…
It’s obvious that there’s a relationship between NFV and the cloud, but for many the relationship is simply one of common ancestry. You host apps in the cloud and with NFV you host features there. Well, there’s a lot more to the cloud than just hosting apps or features. The cloud is the model of…
Here is an interesting question for you. If the gazelle evolves, does the lion also have to change? Of course, you’d say. A food chain generates a chain reaction to any significant alterations. Well, then, how about this one. If network services evolve to something very different, does enterprise network equipment also have to evolve? …
The network operators, particularly the telcos, are in a battle with themselves, attempting a “transformation” from their sale-of-bits model of the past to something different and yet not precisely defined. One likely offshoot of this, Verizon’s decision to acquire AOL, has generated a lot of comment and I think it may also offer some insights…
There are reasons to do things and there are justifications and any CFO knows the difference. In the last four blogs, I’ve talked about the value propositions for SDN and NFV, how they’re impacted by limited perceptions of the things SDN or NFV have to do, and the kind of holistic model that could define…
The question of how the network of the future could work, how SDN in particular could be introduced and managed, needs to be answered. What’s really interesting is that it might have been answered already, and that not only are we not running to explore the solution, we might be running away. One of the…
In my blog on Friday of last week, I talked about the pitfalls of not examining the details of current network services when considering how SDN or NFV might be used to implement or replace them. Some of you have noticed that the blog opens a door to considering network services of all sorts as…