I’m continuing to work through information I’ve been getting from operators worldwide on the lessons they’re learning from SDN and NFV trials and PoCs. The focus of today is the relationship between OSS/BSS and these new technologies. Despite the fact that operators say they are still not satisfied with the level of operations integration into…
Networking and IT have always been “frenemies”. They often compete for budgeting in the enterprises, they certainly have competed for power in the CIO organization. One of the interesting charts I used to draw in trade show presentations tracked how the two areas were competing for “feature opportunity”. By the year 2010, my model showed,…
Virtualization changes a lot of stuff in IT and in networking, for two principle reasons. One is that it breaks the traditional ties between functionality (in the form of software) and resources (both servers and associated connection-network elements). The other is that it creates resource relationships that don’t map to physical links or paths. The…
I blogged recently about the importance of creating NFV services based on an agile markup-like model rather than based on static explicit data models. My digging through NFV PoCs and implementations has opened up other issues that can also impact the success of an NFV deployment, and I want to address two of them today. …
Here’s a riddle for you. What do Fedex and NFV have in common? Answer: Maybe nothing, and that’s a problem. A review of some NFV trials and implementations, and even some work in the NFV ISG, is demonstrating that we’re not always getting the “agility” we need, and for a single common reason. I had…
Networking is changing, in part because of demand-side forces and in part because of technologies. The question is whether technology changes alone can have an impact, and for that one I went to some buyers to get answers on how they viewed some of the most popular new technology options of our time. The results…
The FCC finally released its neutrality order, causing such a run on the website that it crashed the document delivery portion. Generally, the order is consistent with the preliminary statement on its contents that was released earlier, but now that the full text is available it’s possible to pin down some of the issues I…
While vendors are typically pretty coy about public pronouncements on the direction that networking will take, they often telegraph their visions through their product positioning. I think Alcatel-Lucent did just that with its announcement of its metro-optical extensions to its Photonic Service Switch family. Touting the new offerings as being aimed at aggregation, cloud, and…
I always think it’s interesting when multiple news items combine (or conflict) in a way that exposes issues and market conditions. We have that this week with the Cisco/Microsoft cloud partnership, new-model servers from HP, a management change at Verizon, and Juniper’s router announcements. All of these create a picture of a seismic shift in…
OPNFV, the Linux Foundation open-source project for NFV, is getting ready to release its first preliminary code. Everyone, including me, is rooting for a success in creating first a reference implementation of NFV that’s functionally complete and second an open-source framework for that implementation. My concern is as it’s always been; do we know that…