According to practically everyone, video is the fastest-growing and most disruptive of all the Internet traffic sources. Were it not for video we’d probably not have neutrality debates, and most of the return on infrastructure issues operators are bemoaning would disappear. And despite the fact that surveys in both the US and Australia have recently…
We have a couple of important developments on the business side of networking that taken together could signal something significant—but not unexpected. Intel reported numbers that were just consistently good, and Apple and IBM are entering into a mobility partnership. The common thread offers some insight into what’s really happening with the cloud, the PC,…
If you’re a poetry fan like I am, you may be familiar with a poem by John Milton, “On His Blindness”. The poem ends with the phrase “They also serve who only stand and wait”, and I wonder if we could apply Milton’s theory to SDN by changing “serve” to “win”. The prevailing SDN model…
Last week, Netsocket announced its “Virtual Partner Program”, which is hardly the first ecosystemic announcement made by vendors in the next-gen services and SDN/NFV space. The program’s value raises some interesting points about network evolution and also about ecosystems and partner programs in general. I blogged about Netsocket’s approach to NFV when they announced it. …
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…