Cisco did their expected cloud announcement yesterday, but it wasn’t exactly a complete picture of Cisco’s cloud intentions. It was at least a better picture of what Cisco is doing than the media has been able to muster, though. For example, it’s pretty obvious that their investment of a billion dollars in “the cloud” isn’t…
Is Oracle Seeing the Future of IT and Networking?
I promised last week I’d have more to say about Oracle’s quarter, but as you’ll see this blog isn’t as much about Oracle’s quarter as what’s behind it. Oracle could well be the poster child for the new age of tech, the company who can teach us what the future of both IT and networking…
The Reality of Neutrality
I guess it wasn’t hard to figure out what my blog today would be about. Netflix’s CEO has blogged and made some strong comments about the need for a very broad interpretation of “net neutrality”. Netflix in fact wants something even more “neutral” than the FCC order that was overturned on appeal would have provided. …
My Take on the ONF/NFV ISG Strategic Alliance
This week, the ONF and the NFV ISG announced they would be entering a “strategic partnership” to define how NFV could use SDN to address the connectivity requirements of its use cases, and the ONF published a preliminary document to describe an example. That SDN and NFV have to cohabit has been clear from the…
Taking a Harder Look at Cloud, SDN, and NFV Federation
In a previous blog, I talked about two models of “SDN federation”, one that was at the service level and one that was at the “SDN” or controller level. One obvious difference between the two is that the former requires some specific service, whose interworking features then drive the federation process. If you wanted to…
How Enterprises Say We Could Turbocharge the Cloud
We didn’t have a major cloud show in the last month, so I’ve not been blogging much about the cloud compared to other technology revolutions like SDN or NFV. However, I did get some interesting cloud data from the fall survey, and if you combine the data with a bit of modeling and analysis, you…
Why SDN and NFV Need an Operationalization Model
We’ve gone through a whole series of industry events that swirl around the notion of the next-gen network. I’ve blogged a bit about the TMF, NFV, SDN, and fiber conferences, and as people comment on the LinkedIn posts relating to the blogs it’s interesting how often the discussions end up on the topic of “operationalization”. …
NFVI: We Need Something to Run On!
NFV has two “visible” components—the virtual network functions that provide service features and the management and orchestration logic that deploys and sustains them. It also has a critical, complicated, often-ignored third function, which is the network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVI). NFVI is the pool of resources that VNFs and MANO can exploit, and its contents…
Taking a Deeper Look at “Orchestration”
I made a comment in an earlier blog about “orchestration” in the context of service chaining, and a few people messaged me saying they thought the whole orchestration topic was confusing. They’re right, and since it’s very important for a wide range of things in tech these days this is a good time to try…
Does SDN Hype Hurt?
Light Reading has reported that on one of the OFC panels, both vendors and operators expressed concern about the “hype” and even the number of standards bodies associated with SDN. You all know my view about hype and any new technology; we seem to live in a “bandwagon” age where anything that has momentum gets…