Over the past several months, I’ve talked about the evolution in networking (some say “revolution” but industries with 10-year capital cycles don’t have those). Along the way I’ve mentioned vendors who are favored or disadvantaged for various reasons, and opened issues that could help or hurt various players. Now, I propose to use the last…
Raising the Bar on SDN and Virtual Routing
One of the questions being asked by both network operators and larger enterprises is how SDN can play a role in their future WAN. In some sense, though it’s an obvious question, it’s the wrong one. The broad issue is how virtualization can play; SDN is one option within that larger question. If you look…
How Operators Do Trials, and How We Can Expect SDN/NFV to Progress
Since I’ve blogged recently about the progress (or lack of it!) from proof-of-concept to field trials for SDN and NFV, I’ve gotten some emails from you on just what a “field trial” is about. I took a look at operator project practices in 2013 as a part of my survey, and there was some interesting…
There’s Hope for NFV Progress in 2015
Since I blogged recently on the challenges operators faced in making a business case for NFV, I’ve gotten quite a few emails from operators themselves. None disagreed with my major point—the current trial and PoC activity aren’t building a business case for deployment—but they did offer some additional color, some positive and some negative, on…
Happy Holidays from CIMI Corporation
We at CIMI Corporation wish you all the happiest of holiday seasons and the best for the New Year. Click HERE for our holiday card to you. Tom Nolle President Email and RSS:
Domain 2.0, Domains, and Vendor SDN/NFV
Last week we had some interesting news on AT&T’s Domain 2.0 program and some announcements in the SDN and NFV space. As is often the case, there’s an interesting juxtaposition between these events that sheds some light on the evolution of the next-gen network. In particular, it raises the question of whether either operators or…
Public Internet Policy and the NGN
The FCC is now considering a new position on Net Neutrality, and also a new way of classifying multi-channel video programming distributors (MVPDs) that would allow streaming providers who offered “linear” (continuous distribution, similar to channelized RF) programming as opposed to on demand to be MVPDs. That would enable them to negotiate for licensing deals…
What’s Involved in Creating “Service Agility?”
“Service agility” or “service velocity” are terms we see more and more every day. NFV, SDN, and the cloud all rely to a degree—even an increasing degree—on this concept as a primary benefit driver. There is certainly a reason to believe that in the most general case, service agility is very powerful. The question is…
Is Ciena’s Agility Matrix Agile Enough?
NFV, as I’ve said before in blogs, is a combination of three things—the MANO platform that orchestrates and runs services, the NFV Infrastructure on which stuff is run/hosted, and the VNFs that provide the functionality. You need all of them to have “NFV” and it’s not always clear just where any of them will come…
OSI Layers, Policy Control, Orchestration, and NGN
If you look at any model of network evolution, including the one I presented for 2020 yesterday in my blog, you find that it involves a shifting of roles between the familiar layers of the OSI model, perhaps even the elimination of certain layers. That begs the question of how these new layers would cooperate…