SDN, NFV and Network Automation

FlexWare is AT&T's latest offer for NFV (Network Function Virtualization) targeting software control of VNFs for enterprise customers. One of its greatest advantages is its multi-vendor approach, as It is offered in conjunction with AT&T VPN service and supports Juniper and Cisco virtual routers, Fortinet virtual security, and Riverbed virtual WAN accelerator. These AT&T-certified FlexWare Applications can be deployed on either small or medium industry standard FlexWare Devices and come with flexible AT&T or customer management options. According to Roman Pacewicz, SVP &T Business,   In less than 2 years, AT&T has been deployed to more than 2,000 sites globally, expanding to over 200 countries and territories. Orchestration is going to be done through IBM's cloud, cognitive, analytics and security infrastructure. AT&T can install an FlexWare Device on your premises, bring it online and manage it, just as we would a traditional managed network...

Verizon Open Source White Box thoughts Shawn Hakl, Verizon’s vice president of new products and innovation, announced on the May 2017 NFV world congress the launch of Verizon's Open Source White Box solution that will run services from multiple vendors. On his own words "Customers differentiate between white box and gray box solutions. We’ve firmly seen customers are looking for standard off-the-shelf hardware, and they are willing to wait for this,” he said. “They perceive their risk to be really low…The people who have that are going to clean up.” This is quite a significant change on the traditional vendor approach of providing the hardware for virtual customer premises equipment (vCPE), network operating system (for example JunOS or CiscoOS), and the orchestration and provisioning system (For example, Netact). The benefits for the end customers are obvious, you don't require a big infrastructure investment as commodity 8086 hardware will always be cheaper th...

As every year, for quite some time, we had the Dell EMC World (formerly known as EMC world) in Las Vegas, Nevada from May 8th to May 11th. What made it even more special than other EMC worlds before it is that this was the first time Dell Technologies and EMC came together as a single company,  marking it the first trade show ever since the long anticipated $67 billion mega-merge of 2016. At this year’s Dell EMC World 2017, (now affectionately referred to as DEW), Michael took the stage like the rock star CEO that he is, with Van Halen thumping over the sound system. Last year Dell looked confident in the direction the company was headed, this year at DEW in Las Vegas he looked downright pumped. It is not unusual to seeing top CEO’s excited about a company’s competitive prospects but whether it was in Michael’s opening keynote or the follow-on sessions with top Dell Technologies execs, the strategic advantage of the company’s now more tightly integrated and massive por...

Google I/O 2017 - Google  launches a new AI division - Skynet will help sequence DNA not start a war with humans.... yet Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced at the Google's I/O developer conference the launch of a new division that will be dedicated to AI in both services and research. This new division already has a new site www.google.ai and will be focused on AI, deep learning as well as building the services and tools to make it all possible. Pichai also announced new Cloud TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) which uses to train machine-learning models is available in the Google Cloud Platform for anyone to use via the Google Compute Engine today.  In his own words"We want it to be possible for hundreds of thousands of developers to use machine learning". Each device delivers up to 180 teraflops of floating-point performance, and these new TPUs are designed to be connected into even larger systems. A 64-TPU pod can apply up to 11.5 petaflops of com...

Takeaways from 2017 NFV World Congress at San Attending the NFV World Congress last week gave me a chance to talk to many carriers about their migration into a virtualized network. Many have made big progress, very remarkable AT&T, Telefónica and Verizon transformations.  The congress is still small in size compared to others like the Openstack Summit, but it has grown to about over 1,300 delegates in 2016 plus  60+ exhibitors and over 30 live demos. Carriers continue to aggressively push into NFV with NTT announcing they will virtualize 75% of their network by 2020.  AT&T and now NTT Docomo and many others have either declared their virtualization goals or have begun to take active steps toward achieving them. Simplification, automation and virtualization are words that have been used by marketers for years.In my opinion we are at the point were these concepts are not just talk and the “rubber meets the road” point is...