The OFC event is offering us a pretty clear picture of a pretty dramatic contradiction, if that’s not a contradiction in itself! On the one hand, it’s increasingly obvious that there is going to be a lot of optical activity in the next two or three years, but on the other hand it’s clear that…
I’m sure by now that everyone who reads this blog knows my view that the hot spot of networking is metro-cloud. Juniper just announced a small-form-factor member of its PTX optical transport box that’s designed in large part for metro applications. The PTX 3000 is part of the Juniper “Converged Supercore”, which is a distributed…
Some of Cisco’s bigwigs have been talking SDN at the Cisco Tech Editor’s conference, and the sum of their perspectives validates our view that Cisco’s plan for SDN is to seize its benefits without embracing much of its technology. Before you decide I’m off on another rant, let me add that I think that’s perfectly…
Well, it’s “Recap Friday” again, and fortunately there are quite a few sound bites we can recap this week. At the top of the list is the Credit Suisse report on their Next-Generation Data Center Conference. Like most of these conferences, it was a vendor love-fest littered with the usual exaggerations (and perhaps a few…
The EMC/VMware dog-and-pony show on the Pivotal Initiative may be a kind of turning point for the cloud, or more correctly it might be the second of two turning points. It’s certainly going to be a key element in the forward planning of the players, and in my view it’s possibly the beginning of market…
Ok, I admit I have a cynical bend to my mindset. John Gallant, bigwig at Network World at the time, called me “curmudgeonly”—and that was back in 1999! But anyway, when I read an article these days I assume there’s something in it that’s going to set me off. Today, it’s a piece in LR…
We’ve not had much in the way of explicit vendor positioning for Network Functions Virtualization, despite the fact that my model says it will likely have more of an impact on the network equipment market over time than SDN will. Server network middleware optimizer 6WIND had the first positioning of NFV I’ve seen, and Ericsson…
Cisco’s announcement that it would host Arbor’s DDoS defense software on its Carrier Grade Service Engine is another indication that vendors are taking Network Functions Virtualization serious, though still perhaps not serious enough. Yes, we’re hearing more about hosting functions, but we’re still not hearing about an architecture. You can look at most forms of…
Mobile is not only the hottest spot in service provider infrastructure, it’s probably the only hot spot. Mobile profits and revenues still show some glimmers of hope even though ARPU is expected to plateau late this year and start its slow decline next year. My model says that operators are looking to make some smart…
Every once in a while I get a break and have some time to review the comments people make on my semi-annual surveys. The quantitative results can be tabulated pretty quickly but I have to grab a minute here and there to see what people have added as clarifying/expanding remarks, and it’s usually worth the…