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The mistake that could make NFV MANO irrelevant
In this week's round-up of blog posts from around the Web, an analyst takes a closer look at NFV management and orchestration (MANO), explaining why it could play second-fiddle to OpenStack.
According to networking analyst Tom Nolle, recent discussion at Light Reading's NFV Everywhere event suggests that NFV MANO may have "lost its luster."
Nolle believes that MANO is the most innovative feature of NFV, but that it faces a range of challenges. Above all, he writes, MANO has failed to incorporate elements of OSS/BSS, network management systems and network operations centers, as the industry specification group declared these areas out of scope. Nolle calls this a mistake that could be fatal for MANO, preventing NFV from achieving the operational efficiency and service agility it needs to build a compelling business case.
Nolle raises concerns that unless NFV MANO is able to work with operations and legacy equipment, it may simply fade away as a minor alternative to OpenStack.
For NFV proponents, some good news: Overture Networks is integrating its Ensemble Service Orchestrator with Wind River's Titanium Server, combining what Nolle views as the, "best platform available for NFV hosting" with "one of the very few NFV implementations that can actually make a business case."
See more of what Nolle has to say about NFV MANO and why the Overture Networks announcement is big news.
DevOps buyers shake up Application Delivery Controller market
Radical changes are underway in the application delivery controller (ADC) market, says Gartner Inc. research director Andrew Lerner, who details the firm's new Magic Quadrant report in a blog post. The latest shift has sped up the process of change in a sector where, previously, load balancers slowly transitioned into more multifaceted application delivery roles.
According to Lerner, the recent changes have been spurred on by a new legion of DevOps buyers, focused on apps, automation, APIs and a more software-defined approach that stands in contrast to the hardware-centric technology that large network purchasers traditionally buy.
Lerner says the Magic Quadrant report evaluated 10 ADC vendors, with nearly half of those focusing on niche approaches. Brocade has reemerged in the market, while Amazon Web Services has entered the game for the first time. Significantly, neither Brocade nor Amazon are pursuing hardware-based products, underscoring the rise of software-centrism in the market.
See more of Lerner's thoughts on the new Gartner report.
Using SDN to build carrier-grade infrastructure in the cloud
Networking expert Ivan Pepelnjak delved into cloud infrastructure during a recent webinar, expanding on his thoughts on his blog. According to Pepelnjak, it is extremely difficult to achieve carrier-grade levels of reliability in an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud environment, given the variability of IaaS servers.
He recommends setting realistic, business-driven goals, building relatively simple infrastructure and identifying the handful of applications that really need 99.999% availability.
Pepelnjak also notes that carriers who have historically struggled with high costs and complexities may be rushing to adopt NFV too quickly, without considering how to manage the process.
"[Carriers] want to repeat the same mistake, and want cloud architects to build carrier-grade infrastructure on which they'll run unreliable workloads," he adds.
See more of what Pepelnjak has to say about NFV and cloud infrastructure.
