Alcatel-Lucent announced last week that it was getting into the virtual router business, and at the same time announced an evolution to their Nuage SDN platform strategy. The Nuage stuff it good; some of what they did is what Alcatel-Lucent and others should have done from the first with SDN. Some of it also creates…
Neutrality: Don’t Take a Stand, Just Stand
The media is all agog over the decision by the President to endorse a path to neutrality that would include reclassifying ISP services as Title II, meaning making the ISPs common carriers in terms of the Telecom Act. I’ve read that it means the ISPs would become public utilities, or that they’d then have to…
Out With the Old…
An industry is an ecosystem, a cooperative economic unit that shows its directions and signals its changes in many ways, through many channels. Today we have a set of signals that add up to something very interesting, very disturbing to many. Cisco reported their numbers, which the Street characterized as “solid” but with “disappointing guidance”. …
An Open Letter to Juniper’s New (Again!) CEO
From the first, Juniper has had perhaps the strongest hardware technology of any network vendor. For a time, in the middle if the last decade, it also had some of the best marketing. Then things turned for Juniper. It brought in a CEO from Microsoft, a CEO who was supposed to take the company into…
One Operations Model for Networks and Services
OSS/BSS is part and parcel of the business of network operators, the way they manage their people, sell their services, bill and collect, plan…you get the picture. The question of how OSS/BSS will accommodate new stuff like SDN and NFV is thus critical, and anything critical generates a lot of comment. Anything that generates comment…
Another Entry in the Virtual Router Space, but Questions Remain
Juniper has followed the lead of competitors Brocade and Cisco in launching a virtual router product. Their press release on this was refreshingly entertaining, offering the announcement in the context of an example of what it might do. The only problem is that Juniper hasn’t really done anything more than either Cisco or Brocade in…
The Best Marriage of SDN and NFV
The thing about revolutions is that they’re…well…revolutionary. Out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new is a popular concept (especially if you’re not among the “old”). They’re exciting because the shake things up, create new media fodder, all sorts of good stuff. But they’re expensive and tiring, and so it’s hard to have more than one of them in the same market…
Is This the “Grand Alliance of NFV?”
SDN and NFV have been media events for sure, like the cloud. But like the cloud, SDN and NFV are technology revolutions that require both the technology part (the right architectures and elements) and some revolutionaries. We’ve been sadly lacking in both, but that may now be changing. Two of the most credible of all…
Did the NFV ISG Bite Off Too Little?
Light Reading’s Carol Wilson did another nice interview this week, and documented it in a story about the progress and future of the ETSI NFV. A good part of the story focuses on the assertion that the ISG had to constrain its scope to get its work done. Respectfully, I disagree. Telecom is an industry…
Looking at NFV From the VNF Side Now
Last week, and in prior blogs, I mentioned the fact that virtual network functions (VNFs) have to be recipients of NFV services, and that the sum of these services may determine the ease with which current network code could migrate to become VNFs. It’s also a determinant in the portability of VNFs across multiple platforms,…