Light Reading had an interesting article that featured a Cisco presentation on “The Self-Publishing Network”. The points Cisco’s quoted on are interesting, and while I don’t fully agree with them, I think they reflect some important changes in the way we visualize networks, network services, and service lifecycle automation. The basic premise is that network…
One interesting question a client of mine raised recently is the impact of infrastructure abstraction on management tools and practices. What goes on inside a black box, meaning an abstract intent model of a feature or application component, is opaque. The more that you put inside, the more opacity you generate. How do you manage…
For years now, IBM has been struggling to arrest revenue and profit problems, and they got it at least somewhat right in their last quarter. Perhaps the positive response to their quarterly report this week was almost a “relief rally”, but the stock was up this week on their beating estimates. The question isn’t so…
If we really want cloud-native network service features, and optimum use of them, we should probably look at two factors beyond those that I laid out to make NFV itself more cloud-native. One is the issue of “configuration” and “parameter” control, and the other is the ever-complicated issue of address space. Again, the cloud world…
Carrier cloud is IMHO the foundation of any rational network operator virtualization strategy. It would make zero sense for operators to build out hosting infrastructure for specific applications or service missions. This is the industry, after all, that has decried the notion of service-specific silos from the very first. Capital and operations efficiency alike depend…
Enterprises have their own plans for IT and networking for 2019, and since I’ve done a blog on the service provider side, I also want to do one for enterprises. My own enterprise survey process isn’t as comprehensive as for the network operators, so I’m also commenting on predictions made by the financial industry to…
I’ve been having some interesting exchanges with operations planners in a couple dozen network operators who have done some NFV deployments. My goal was to see what the issues are likely to be in 2019, and the results were in some cases unexpected. Perhaps the area where there have been the most surprises has been…
The notion of composable infrastructure or infrastructure abstraction is one of my favorites. I think it’s probably the most important piece of our overall virtualization puzzle, in fact, but it’s also something that could present serious problems. That’s particularly true given how fuzzy the concept is to most users. At the end of last year,…
A Cisco executive cites five network technologies as critical for enterprises in 2019, according to a Cisco blog and a Network World article. In fact, these five will be game-changers according to Cisco’s VP of engineering, so “2019 is going to be a transformative year in enterprise networking.” What are these technologies, and is Cisco…
Virtual networking or Network-as-a-service (NaaS) makes connectivity easier, but it complicates automation of lifecycle processes. The problem is that when “services” are created on top of connectivity rather than through the same devices that provide connectivity, you lose some insight into service behavior. You also lose pretty much all of the traditional ways of doing…