Everyone accepts that network operators would love to eliminate proprietary network devices. NFV was aimed at eliminating at least some of them, but using a cloud to host a data-plane function has its issues. AT&T recognized this and decided to frame an open (later released as open-source) operating system to run in an appliance and…
One of the things I learned in the past was that “necessary” and “sufficient” conditions were worlds apart. Another thing I learned was that “pent-up demand” reflects in how realization of opportunity bunches up until released. It’s pretty clear that 5G supporters haven’t learned that lesson, as an article in Light Reading reflects. A “necessary”…
Light Reading did a nice piece on Google and their new hire to head the telecom, media, and entertainment piece of Google Cloud. John Honeycutt came from the TV side, the Discovery Channel specifically, and so he’s much more a content guy than a cloud service guy. Specifically, he was in charge of IT, media…
Ciena is now spinning out its Blue Planet orchestration, a move first referenced in their earnings call and now reported by SDxCentral. Ciena offered a blog of its own on the topic recently. Both these sources are long on the “new division” piece, but short of details on the mission, the architectural model, and the…
Some recent stories on cloud provider growth and total revenue show Amazon well out in front of everyone else, Microsoft in a comfortable second place with faster-than-average growth, and Google and IBM locked in third place. I’ve noted that a part of the total cloud dynamic is the market segments each provider is addressing. Amazon…
I had a really interesting talk with a senior operator technology planner about a term we hear all the time, “cloud-native”. She suggested that we substitute another term for it, “cloud-naïve” because she believed that there was “zero realism” in how the cloud in general and cloud-native in particular were being considered. If that’s true,…
Test equipment was a mainstay in networking when I first got into it 40 years ago or so, but the role of testing in modern networking has been increasingly hard to define. Part of that is that a lot of “testing” was never about networks at all, and part is because what a network is…
What have we learned so far from earnings season? It’s always hard to interpret these quarterly events, particularly since they’re at least as much a hype-Wall-Street exercise as a report on the company’s activities. Still, you can often interpret some interesting things, particularly if you look at multiple players in the same space. AT&T and…
The blog I did yesterday on Cisco’s approach to edge or universal distributed computing got me some email questions and raised some LinkedIn comments. These combine to suggest that spending a little time on the issue of resource abstraction or “virtualization” versus infrastructure composition might be useful. As always, it seems, we’re hampered by a…
You could argue that SDN evolved to SD-WAN, then perhaps to SDN plus SD-WAN. Now Cisco wants to evolve SD-stuff to another level, which they call “Data Center Anywhere”. In concept, this combines aspects of software-defined networking and edge computing to permit not only uniform access to central resources but also access to distributed resources. …