Let’s face it, this hasn’t been a good quarter, even a good year, for tech. Given that, how is it that an IT company that’s been around for longer than most of today’s technology professionals have lived seems to be doing more than OK? IBM seems to be bucking the downturn. What can we learn…
What makes virtualization, whether it be IT or network, work? The best definition for virtualization, IMHO, is that it’s a technology set that creates a behavioral abstraction of infrastructure that behaves like the real infrastructure would. To make that true, you need an abstraction and a realization, the latter being a mapping of a virtual…
One problem that networks have posed from the first is how to optimize them. An optimum network, of course, is in the eye of the beholder; you have to have a standard you’re trying to meet to talk about optimization. Networks can be optimized by flow and by cost, and most experts have always believed…
I get a lot of comments and feedback from vendors, enterprises, and network operators. Recently, there’s been an uptick on topics related to Network Functions Virtualization, NFV. Some of this has apparently come out of the increased activity around Google’s Nephio initiative, which aims at creating a Kukbernetes-based management and orchestration framework. Some has come…
Many people have heard the “A rose by any other name…” quote. Let me offer a network technology slant on that, which is “A dumb pipe created by any technology is still a dumb pipe”. Given that we’ve got operator and vendor commentary that takes the opposite stance, we apparently need to look a bit…
OK, Broadcom is buying VMware, and most of the comments I’ve seen from industry analysts or the Street have been, well, doubtful. I guess that makes it fair play that I have doubts about their doubts. There are potential issues raised by the deal, but they’re not spectacularly different from the issues raised by any…
Let’s face it, Cisco’s quarter was bad, and nothing management says can alter that. Supply chain issues may have been a factor, but it’s hard to justify the miss and the weak guidance Cisco supported with that excuse (one, by the way, that all the vendors who have weak quarters have been using). They did…
VMware has been making a lot of Open RAN announcements, and that’s important. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the whole open-model network approach. Yes, it demonstrates the strength of the Open RAN movement and the impact that might have on telecom infrastructure. The real story, though, is that all Open RAN successes don’t have…
The rich get richer, so the saying goes, and in the public cloud space that’s likely true, because the big are getting bigger. According to an article in SDxCentral, the big three of public cloud (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) took a larger share of cloud spending—62% in the latest quarter versus 58% a year ago….
The old “How low can you go?” question may be, for broadband at least, be augmented by the question “How much capacity can we sell?” As this story in Light Reading shows, at least some operator planners are looking onward to things like 10G consumer broadband services. While this might be generating what the media…