SDN/NFV: Gold Rush or Fool’s Gold?

Another gold rush has brought a high level of excitement to the network infrastructure producers and consumers alike. The mad dash to SDN/NFV feels like déjà vu, for example, mid 1990s for ATM and late 1990s for MPLS. See Paul Parker Johnson’s “How SDN (Today) Is Like MPLS Was (Then).” There are huge expectations from all stakeholders to offer and implement infrastructures that reduce both capital and operational expenditures, in addition to opening new doors for rapid deployment of innovative and lucrative business services.

Intuitively, the SDN/NFV combination should reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), both capex (COTS versus purpose-built hardware) and opex (cost of provisioning and network maintenance). In evaluating TCO, there are other costs that could favor one approach versus the other.

Most often, capex savings are only discussed in terms of COTS hardware versus physical or purpose-built hardware. Basically, capex includes any upfront nonrecurring cost; that includes the cost of “network roll-out” (NRO), which is the cost of integration, testing and verification of the incremental hardware into the existing infrastructure. Unlike the cost of hardware, this cost component is not usually depreciable unless the NRO is done by the hardware vendor, and the cost is negotiated in advance. Other capex costs can include the cost of the underlying transmission network (in some countries this is leased). For NFV, the transmission network (and eventually the hardware maintenance) can be leased from the owner of the data center, which turns this cost into an opex component as it becomes a recurring cost.

A major advantage of SDN/NFV is in its opex, which gives the operators the ability to rapidly provision new services. Service roll-out is reduced by an order of magnitude of months to days. Moreover, with fast service roll-out, a new service can be tested with a limited set of customers first, and then upon favorable feedback it can be introduced to the entire target market. This can save a lot of headache (and money) later if the service turns out to be not as well received as it was expected.

Today, most infrastructures that are built on purpose-built hardware are going to stay in operation for a while and in many cases even after they are fully depreciated. Therefore, while migration to function virtualization is moving forward, operators will face a period of a “double opex” cost factor. This is not lost on anyone, and it can become a factor in delaying the decision to virtualization.

The move to virtualization requires a close study of the intermediate and long-term goals of the organization: customer needs, market penetration goals, and service offering to name a few. Although cost containment is a big factor, the revenue side of the equation must be given a much higher weight to remain competitive. After all, costs cannot go below zero, but the sky is the proverbial limit for revenue generation! And this is where SDN/NFV based infrastructures shine: rapid deployment of new and potentially lucrative services.

Click for more information about Robert Haim.

 
         Robert Haim
     rhaim@acgcc.com
       www.acgcc.com

Ixia’s Application Performance & Security Resiliency Value Proposition: An ACG HotSeat

Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research and Bethany Mayer, CEO of Ixia, discuss the company’s new business strategy and how it is focused on two key value propositions: application performance and security resiliency. Ixia’s value proposition is targeted to three key segments: network equipment manufacturers, carriers and service providers, both telcos and cloud providers, and enterprises. 

Listen to Bethany discuss Ixia’s value proposition and how it is applied during predeployment or in the operational network across the entire infrastructure and in the devices in the infrastructure so that customers achieve the security that they want and expect in their applications and across their infrastructure.

Click for more information about ACG Research’s HotSeat Videos.

For more information about ACG’s services, contact info@acgcc.com.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

The Time Is Now for NFV

Traditional network architectures based upon purpose-built network appliances and the resulting complex manual and proprietary systems interfaces used to support a rapidly increasing diversity of network appliances have been identified as the root causes of high-cost, poor capacity scaling, and long deployment and innovation cycles. This is affecting the sustainability of network operators’ business models. As a result, network operators have launched their NFV initiatives to overcome the limitations of traditional network architecture. NFV is explicitly designed to reduce cost, and increase network scalability and agility. 

ACG’s whitepaper shows that the common platform approach is uniquely able to support a sustainable business model through implementation of NFV and that appliance-based and NFV custom vertical software stack approaches are likely to fail.

Click to download the TCO “Visualizing the Mobile Core.”

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Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

Increasing Business Agility through Layered Orchestration: An ACG HotSeat Video with Gee Rittenhouse, Cisco

Ray Mota, CEO, ACG Research, interviews Gee Rittenhouse, SVP, Cloud and Virtualization Group at Cisco. They discuss why Cisco has divided orchestration into two layers: one southbound facing layer, focusing on orchestrating physical and virtual network infrastructure and services, and the other northbound facing layer, focusing on customers and around business processes. They discuss how Cisco’s layered approach to orchestration uniquely addresses the top three requirements of the industry and providers: business agility, operational simplification and automation. To achieve and significantly accelerate these requirements, there must be a clear decoupling of the service from the infrastructure, a dramatic change from today’s tight coupling of infrastructure and services.

Listen to how Cisco’s approach drives business agility to new levels.

For more information about ACG's video services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

Juniper and Ruckus: A Combination Sure to Shake Up the Unified Communications Market

This strategic alliance reinforces the inter-relatedness of the wireless market and portends disruption.

Juniper Networks, which has been looking for a unified communications solution for quite some time, recently announced its partnership with carrier/enterprise Wi-Fi hardware and software vendor Ruckus. The companies plan to offer solutions that pair Juniper’s EX Series Ethernet switches with Ruckus’ ZoneFlex Wi-Fi access points and SmartZone Wi-Fi management software to enterprise, government, and education clients. This alliance comes on the heels of another significant announcement: HP’s (Juniper Ethernet competitor) acquisition of Aruba Networks, which was Juniper’s partner since last year.

Juniper’s alliance with its interesting value proposition will pose significant competition to Cisco/Meraki and HP/Aruba and no doubt will shake up the expanding unified communications market. We believe that the Cisco/Meraki and HP/Aruba will maintain strengths as they do have extensive wired and wireless offerings but as Juniper puts down stakes we would anticipate some serious changes in market shares. The bottom line is that it’s all about innovation and positioning, for example, if Juniper can enhance the enterprise environment by introducing products that could lower the number of logical network devices that need to be managed by IT administrators that could result into a key advantage. Similar solutions could be attractive enough to disrupt the WiFi enterprise market and threaten the major vendors’ leadership.

We do see this partnership as one of many in broader enterprise access realignment (in parallel with Enterprise Small Cells market) with more to come this year and next. The enterprise and the indoor coverage and access markets have been a hot field lately with high promising revenues, on which undoubtedly Juniper wants to capitalize. This alliance is expected to pay bigger dividends in the service provider market where both companies see their strengths.

This next step for Juniper is extremely important as it joins this upcoming unified communications market in a “never too late” move. Perhaps market pressures, dynamics and the new strategic plan will force a severing of the Aruba relationship, which will most likely cease in the next six months or earlier. Time will tell.

Click for more information about Elias Aravantinos.

    

    Elias Aranvantino

    earanvantino@acgcc.com

    www.acgcc.com

Most IoT Industry Narratives Are Wrong!

Yes, it’s true; Internet of Things (IoT) is caught up in the whirlwind of hype, exuberance and outright giddiness. It will be a sad day when neophyte IoT enthusiast wake up and realize this. You can’t blame the younger crowd from behaving this way as it’s probably their first tech hype cycle (documented by The Gartner Hype Cycle). Anyone over 30, however, should know better. 

Hype cycles are a fun ride and ironically, many entities and people make a lot of money in the exuberant whirlwind as enthusiast entrepreneurs and innovation ecosystem participants race to be part of next unicorn or the next Google, Facebook, etc. The first to make money are the highly respected market research firms. It’s a $9 trillion dollar market, no it’s a $14 trillion market, no wait let’s call it the Internet of Everything and call it an $18 trillion market. If it’s everything why is it only $18 trillion. The first question to ask them is “are you sure it’s not $14.7652497 trillion?” Guess their dart board doesn’t have that kind of resolution. Yet, people buy these reports to show internal and external investment sources that their idea is a slam dunk. Ten percent market share is still $1.4 billion dollars, right.

The next to make money in hype cycles are the trade show and conference companies. There are global, national and regional IoT conferences every month. Companies pay to speak to position themselves as thought leaders and people pay to attend to get smart. Note to self, next time I pay a hard-earned dollar to attend an IoT event please assess me with a $1,000 stupidity tax. The topics covered in these shows haven’t evolved in two to three years. By the way, in a few years there WILL NOT be IoT conferences as the topics will be covered in the appropriate vertical market conference: cloud, big data and analytics.

These two early money makers are what’s driving the erroneous narrative of IoT. Why is it wrong? Let’s take an end-to-end view of a solution utilizing IoT technologies (note phrasing). First, we’ll normalize the intelligence throughout the system to 100. The current narrative looks at the IoT equation as this:

In many discussions even Ithing is extremely small and most of the intelligence is located in the cloud and includes “big data” and “analytics.” Isn’t there a glaring omission in this narrative formula? By this definition Inetwork is zero:

Thus, the network must be always there, instantly accessible and, of course, free. The current narratives imply that network intelligence is zero. Isn’t the “I” in IoT the “Internet”? Perhaps for many IoT enthusiast the network is zero since they don’t care about:

1. Cost of transmission (it’s not always free)

2. Cost and power consumption of the modem/radio in the thing

3. Bit rates: maximum, minimum, average peak, average, symmetry (upstream/downstream)

4. Distance verse throughput

5. Latency, round trip delay, connection set up time.

6. Jitter, congestion, dropped packets, availability,

7. Security

There are many markets under the IoT hype umbrella (note phrasing again) where the network can be zero. However, for most markets the network cannot be a ZERO! The correct formula and the correct industry narrative is:

It’s open to an interesting discussion of how the 100 units of intelligence are distributed. Yet, one thing we know for certain is:

Therefore, service providers (telco, cable, wireless) need to take action to change the industry narrative or risk becoming a commodity bit pipe providers. The longer Inetwork is zero the more challenging it will be to overcome this perception. Networking solution vendors need to actively participate in changing this narrative as well or they risk selling commodity solutions to the commodity bit pipe providers.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail contact Greg at gwhelan@acgcc.com.

Greg Whelan
gwhelan@acgcc.com
acgcc.com

Wi-Fi: The Toy that Grew Up

Historically, mobile network operators (MNOs) looked at Wi-Fi as a toy, a low-end technology that was great to off-load data from networks. Now Wi-Fi is having a strategic impact on MNOs across the globe. Now the question is LTE or Wi-Fi: remind me which one’s for off-load?

Yet, as with many technical innovations, the low-end always wins. Wi-Fi is a classic example of this theory. Through a combination of Moore’s Law, economies of scale, R&D investments and free market dynamics Wi-Fi is king of the hill. In most developed countries people and things can access a Wi-Fi network in 80% of locations. Companies, such as Devicescape, have created virtual networks based on “ambient’ Wi-Fi networks. Hotspots are so ubiquitous that Opensignal launched an application to find the best one out of the many available. Read more.

For more information about Greg Whelan, click here.

Greg Whelan
gwhelan@acgcc.com
acgcc.com

Telecom 2025 Looks Like…

We can all to some extent predict the future; some predictions are a hit while most are a miss with lots in the “sort of” category. And when it comes to telecommunication predictions add the N-dimensional perfect storm of innovations, market disruptions, new business models, disintermediation, mega-mergers, etc.

The global telecom market (fixed and wireless) has unique characteristics which make it so fascinating to study. It’s critical to a city and to a country for economic prosperity, it impacts billions of people’s lives, it’s cross border and it’s a trillion dollar market to name just a few. It has also emerged as a key battle space for asymmetric warfare, leveling the battlefield which closes the gap of U.S. global dominance. If you add to the discussion the importance and outright dependence on satellites for an array of commercial and military applications and the deployment of anti-satellite weapons the global telecommunication market gets even more interesting.

That said here are my easy predictions that I think most people will agree with for what telecom 2025 will look like:

1. There will be less and larger global service providers.
    a. Mega mergers are inevitable as traditional carriers need economies of scale.

2. There will be a wider range of service provider business models.
    a. New “service providers” will arise
    b.There will be an Uber or AirBnB carrier, for example, large and successful without owning any network
    c. Intelligence interconnections and federations will be paramount.

3. Security will continue to be a constant and ever increasing challenge.
    a. Akin to 1920 leapfrogging between bank safe companies and back robbers.

4. Access will be thought of as … people and things accessing the cloud and each other.
    a. It will be a near real-time decision of what network

These are the easy predictions. Yet, the implications of them are vast and substantial and will impact billions of people and affect billions of dollars of investments. It’s truly an interesting time to be in this industry.

Send me (gwhelan@acgcc.com) your easy or innovative ideas of what the global telecom market will look like in 10 years and I will aggregate the replies and send them out to all who participated.

Click for more information about Greg Whelan.

Greg Whelan
gwhelan@acgcc.com
acgcc.com

How SDN (Today) Is Like MPLS Was (Then)

…and how reflecting on this can help navigate the path ahead in realizing the promise of the new software-defined model

A number of parallels exist between the nascent forms of software-defined networking (SDN) we are working with today and the early stages of development in a similar area of technology that began in the mid 1990s and required more than a decade of steady enhancements to become the essential part of many network deployments that MPLS is today.

By looking at these parallels we can gain some perspective on the nature of such innovations and, yes, their related upheavals, as well as inspiration for continuing to work hard on the finer points of implementation that will ultimately bring the simplified, more agile design model of SDN into wider use.

Let’s look at the parallels in point-counterpoint mode.

Today: We often say in moments of exasperation things such as there are too many forms of SDN; it will die before lift-off because the parts just won’t play with each other.

Then: In 1997 the comments were that there were too many forms of MPLS (too many ways distributing labels in a network, TDP, LDP, BGP, etc.), and how will we ever build multivendor deployments? In the end, meeting customers’ requirements whittled options down to a few basic alternatives that allowed for some choice, but ensured multivendor networks using MPLS could be built.

Today: There are too many choices for communicating with elements southbound from controllers; there is no real hope for efficiencies and scaling in control plane abstractions.

Then: In the late 90s on MPLS we said things such as there are too many choices for implementing VPNs, quality of service and traffic engineering with MPLS; we will never be able to build real service offerings. But eventually customers’ requirements brought RSVP-TE, MP-BGP, VPLS, and BGP/MPLS IP VPNs into play as means of meeting market requirements with interoperable designs.

Today: People ask, how do I monitor this (add your own euphemism) thing and dismissively assert that SDN will forever be a lab experiment unless the real-time and on-going needs of managing such software-driven solutions can be met.

Then: In the early days of MPLS we said similar things. MPLS was interesting in the lab, but it would never be adopted widely unless we solved the OA&M problem. And with the firm guidance of customers’ demands the development of mechanisms to manage MPLS networks evolved via RFC 4379, LSP ping, LSP traceroute, and other mechanisms widely employed today.

And as we speak, innovation around MPLS is not yet dead despite its widespread adoption. EVPN and Segment Routing are two cases in point for how the evolution continues.

By reflecting on these innovations and their refinement over time, we can perhaps weave in a modest amount of patience amidst the stream of developments and implementation models we are digesting with the new designs that are ushering SDN incrementally into our multidomain, multilayer, and multivendor world.

In the end it may not matter if OpenFlow, XMPP, and NETCONF coexist in portions of an otherwise abstracted control plane. It may not matter that the service management templates used in different controllers vary greatly in implementation today, as they may evolve to converge on a few basic models as customers’ deployments continue, as happened with MPLS OAM.

No doubt we are in the disruptive, chaotic, and sometimes confusing phase of innovation when it comes to SDN (for the WAN, for overlay networks, for underlay physical systems, for VNFs, etc.). But if we focus on the gains available from the architecture that have been shown in their early forms to date (flexibility in platform choice, efficiency and scale in monitoring large network systems, and acceleration of new service deployment, to name a few examples) and work on closing the gaps in the implementations that remain to be resolved for the deployments to be pursued with more confidence, we may benefit in a manner similar to the way we did from the persistence of the innovators who spawned MPLS and labored for its viable deployment in the wide array of use cases we have it deployed in today.

Click for more information about Paul Parker Johnson.

For more information about ACG’s SDN services, click here.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

www.acgresearch.net

Five Lessons Equipment Providers Learned from Deploying IoT Solutions

Dennis Ward discusses five lessons the equipment providers have learned form deploying Internet of Things solutions. He talks about horizontal platforms, end-to-end solutions, subscriber-based billing models and security.

Click to read the entire blog.

Click for more information about ACG’s IoT services.

Dennis Ward

dward@acgcc.com

acgcc.com