Just where is the cloud, as an element of IT? We hear a lot of stuff about it, but it’s hard these days to rely much on what we hear. Is the cloud really dominating IT, is it really going to eat the data center? What can we expect from cloud providers? All this stuff…
The metaverse took a step (in some direction or another) with the formation of a standards body called “The Metaverse Standards Forum” (a more technical view can be found HERE). Meta is unsurprisingly initiating the move, with Microsoft support, and other tech giants like Adobe and Nvidia have joined. The body offers the potential benefit…
Most of you know that I’ve been an advocate of intent-modeled, model-driven, networking for almost two decades. This approach would divide a service into functional/deployable elements, each represented by a “black box” intent model responsible for meeting an SLA. This approach has some major advantages, in my view, and also a few complications. Operators generally…
Crypto has surely had its problems recently, even major problems. Meta has been under pressure too, and there are signs that the Web3 hype wave has already crested. Is there a connection between these events, either in the sense that there’s a common underlying issue, or in the sense that one problem area might feed…
Google is entering the private 5G space, so the story goes, but what it’s likely doing is a bit more profound than that. Does it mean that “private 5G” is going to take off? Does that mean that public 5G is in even more trouble than some have said? Is something even more potentially disruptive…
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…