Over the last year, we’ve seen a significant transition in expectations for things like SDN and NFV that are aimed at transforming networks. Where once it was believed that moving to white-box switches and functionality hosted on cheap servers was a major driver of change, it’s now broadly accepted that something else has to drive…
Everyone surely knows the old saw about the difficulty in pushing spaghetti uphill, and it occurs to me that we’re in danger of trying to do something very like that with changes created by SDN and NFV, perhaps even the cloud. The expression is usually applied to tasks that are made difficult not by the…
I read a piece this morning, a paper from a vendor, who’s promising that just because SDN comes along, Levels 4-7 won’t get commoditized. We’re suffering here again by a victory of hype and popular usage over technical accuracy, and so it’s time we took a look at the whole “higher-layer” or Level 4-7 picture…
According to a decent interview/story in Light Reading, Broadcom has an NFV strategy (no surprise) and it’s one that favors the notion of a hybrid technology approach, augmenting COTS with specialized technology to enhance performance (no surprise there either; they make the stuff). But just because you’re opportunistic doesn’t mean you’re wrong, and there are…
As we start to hear more about NFV from the application and services side, it’s becoming clear that there are different views of NFV insofar as its relationship with device/appliance networks, hosted functions, and the cloud. From a benefits perspective it’s important to understand these differences because any specific NFV benefit can drive things forward…
In the hype-ridden NFV space, Metaswitch has always stood out for me as a voice of both reason and experience. As the founder of the Project Clearwater open-source IMS project, they’re knowledgeable about cloud-based carrier functionality and open-source at the same time. As a member of the CloudNFV™ group they are one of the few…
You’ve all probably heard about (if not read) the “Tale of Two Cities”, a story that in part emphasizes life as a tension between two poles. Guess what? We have that in NFV, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Yesterday, I got a copy of the interim report for one…
Credit Suisse has some interesting data on the data center switching market, and I think it’s particularly interesting when you look at in light of the overall weakness in IT spending that Gartner previously reported. It also raises some points about SDN evolution and what can be expected there. First, the data center is the…
Gartner released some IT data it will be discussing further in a financial analyst conference next week. The information suggests that IT spending is growing more slowly than previously estimated, and it probably won’t surprise you to learn that software growth is well ahead of hardware growth. The company says that “Price pressure based on…
We continue to have a lot of discussion around the use of open-source technology by network operators in NFV and SDN applications. Obviously, the majority of the SDN spectrum is already covered by open source (OpenDaylight for example) and there’s no shortage of open source in NFV either, with OpenStack, Linux, and so forth. Why…