It’s interesting to me that we’re starting to see focus on the key issues of the cloud, SDN, and NFV but not necessarily the kind of focus you’d expect. To me, and to the enterprises and operators I survey, there is a clear need for some unifying vision because there is simply no appetite for funding and driving three independent revolutions. One would expect an advancing state of awareness would advance uniting our key concepts, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
What is happening visibly is that comments and claims in all these spaces are getting a bit more strident and focusing a bit more on a perceived near-term opportunity. The global economy is recovering, and that’s obviously raising hopes of vendors that long-curtailed capital programs may be finally completed. For incumbents (like Cisco) we see this in the form of determination to drive current incumbencies forward, because it takes more time to change network strategies and embark on a new course than to simply re-invest in old ones. Even today, too, buyers believe that they need to address SDN and NFV more in terms of investment protection than in terms of actual exploitation of benefits. Even the cloud, senior partner of our three revolutions in terms of age, is still not viewed strategically by the majority of either enterprise or service provider buyers.
We started the cloud, SDN, and NFV all at the bottom. We’ve spent time defining low-level structures and issues without having established the high-level framework in which the stuff is supposed to work. How long have we heard about “northbound APIs” that one of my clients whimsically refers to as the “APIs to nowhere” because vendors never seem to know what’s up there. Classic software architecture practices dictate a top-down approach, and while everyone agrees that the cloud, SDN, and NFV are all about software, we somehow forgot that top-down mandate. That’s why maturation of views in each of the three areas isn’t yet leading to reconciliation of technology among them. We’re still in the basement and don’t realize we’re building condos and not single-family homes.
One of the interesting developments of the last month just might change all of this. HP’s “OpenNFV” represents the most complete articulation of a tech model that could converge SDN, NFV, and the cloud. Stated in HP-centric marketing terms, OpenNFV is a combination of basic cloud platform tools, contributed special HP elements, and things from ecosystem partners. That’s not a bad approach in my view, but it’s demonstrated it has a specific weakness in a tactical-hype-driven market. That weakness is from “partners” eager to stamp on a logo but short on commitment to actually do something useful. Some operators in my most recent survey indicated they believed that HP’s OpenNFV was actually losing momentum and focus; they were all quite happy in the fall of last year.
The recent announcements of SDN tools designed for multi-tenant cloud networking are to me an interesting example. First-off, we already have multi-tenant clouds and so it’s hard to see how this sort of thing by itself would create a huge stir in the market. Second, where multi-tenancy at the cloud level is actually critical is in NFV. HP doesn’t really address the NFV application at all, even though it would be an ideal element in OpenNFV. Some of the NFV-related things that HP has claimed would be supported by OpenNFV, including and especially open management integration, are still to be firmed up, are also very useful to cloud providers and even to enterprises but the connection isn’t there.
There seem to be three factors pushing us away from harmonizing our revolutions where they naturally meet—the top. One is that old problem of vendors pushing tactical sales points because they’re afraid a mass strategic review will hold up spending that might now be recovering. Another is that buyers tend to want to apply new technology in niches where the risk can be controlled and the business case can be made easily. That discourages buyer-driven discourses on high-level revolution convergence. Finally, the media wants to cover everything in a couple hundred words with a jazzy headline. Explaining complicated stuff is simply beyond their ken. In working on the first video tutorial (of, probably, six tutorials in total) to explain my ExperiaSphere open management and orchestration framework, I’m finding a high-level intro alone is likely to take a full hour and the total material is likely to be five times that length. You can understand how reporters would have a hard time dealing with this.
HP’s OpenNFV seems to me to introduce a new factor, which is what I’ll call “ecosystemic hope”. I know this stuff has to be done, and I support that fully. I support it by adding some sockets at the top of my own products, facing in the direction of the user and applications, and hoping some partner will hook something useful to them.
The challenge for HP and others with ecosystemic hope is that when you dissect the pieces of the high-level convergence of our revolutions, you are left with things that could be highly disruptive but that can’t build a compelling benefit case by themselves. It’s a lot of work to drag big rocks to a stream, uncomfortable to wade out and get the placed, and without some acknowledged benefit of what’s to be found on the opposite bank, it’s hard to build momentum for the task. HP, and Alcatel-Lucent who is also thinking ecosystemically, are going to find it challenging to address the high-level issues of any of the revolutions through partners. They need to bite the bullet and define an approach, then populate it with the critical elements.
HP may be doing that; they have at least admitted that OpenNFV has to include HP-supplied secret sauce. They’re not hurrying though, as their positioning of their SDN stuff shows. Alcatel-Lucent has announced a reference server architecture to fend off competition from vendors who offer servers on their own, but I’m still trying to get a high-level management and orchestration vision from them (I have another call later this week). The only good news is that just as having five or so feeder roads converging on a main highway, the visible process of combining the feeders inevitably opens the question of what happens on that highway. We can only hope that insights on our three revolutions, insights at the top of each, will raise realization that we really are heading for one road ahead.