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…
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…
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,…
We have some financial news from the industry today, and we can weave it with some of the technical topics that have been buzzing around to pose a question. How would SDN and NFV transform the competitive landscape? Will the business of networking, the vendors who drive it, be significantly impacted by these technologies? The…
A couple of you dropped me an email after my last blog and expressed an interest in hearing more about what I’d described as “functional” versus “structural” orchestration in NFV and even related technologies (SDN and the cloud). OK, here goes. If we start with the service example I gave in yesterday’s blog, we can…
I’ve been blogging that the SDN and NFV evolution we’ve been engaged with had been approached top-down instead of the other way around, things would have been different. I offered a quick view of what top-down NFV might have looked like. Of course, I know as well as you all that we can’t roll back…
I’ve talked a lot about the importance of NFV to the industry at large, and about the fact that management/orchestration (MANO) is the heart of NFV. As the term itself suggests, MANO is the fusion of two interdependent processes that also happen to be phases in a service lifecycle. To most involved in NFV, the…
Juniper had their earnings call yesterday, and the refrain was hardly unexpected given general market trends and Juniper’s recent earnings calls. CEO Shaygan Kheradpir started by saying that the company had made significant progress and the disappointing results were due to “industry headwinds”. That may be different words than the last Juniper CEO used to…
The relationship between Cisco, VMware, and EMC has been a great source of sound bites in the last year or so. When EMC and Cisco partnered to create VCE, a kind of orphan acronym that likely stands for “Virtual Cloud Environment” but which the VCE “About” page fails to define, there was speculation that the…
VMware reported its quarter, and while the company beat expectations overall, the report still raises several questions and doesn’t answer some of the bigger holdovers. I’ve been talking about the “Novell effect” in prior blogs, and it’s obvious that VMware faces the risk of simply saturating its market. While there are exits from that risk…