SDN and NFV have been media events for sure, like the cloud. But like the cloud, SDN and NFV are technology revolutions that require both the technology part (the right architectures and elements) and some revolutionaries. We’ve been sadly lacking in both, but that may now be changing. Two of the most credible of all the NFV players, HP and Wind River, have formed an alliance.
I’ve blogged about both these companies before. In its Titanium ecosystem, Wind River has what I believe to be the best foundation technology for NFV infrastructure, a software platform that can deliver the kind of reliability and availability that operators will need if they’re to exchange appliances for applications. HP’s OpenNFV provides the best NFV implementation of any major vendor, and includes the critical orchestration element of NFV that’s been fobbed off by most players.
The partnership between the companies is essentially an integration of Wind River into HP’s Helion OpenStack platform, which means that the two companies will be offering enhanced platform support for the cloud as well. That’s good news because NFV and the cloud are kissing cousins. But it also raises the big question on the alliance—how much will the two companies really cooperate to move the ball with NFV.
The great contradiction of NFV is that all the value comes from one component and all the money will be made on another. I’ve blogged several times about the importance of the NFV’s management/orchestration (MANO) element. Michael Howard of Infonetics sent me a presentation he gave at the SDN OpenFlow World Congress in Dusseldorf in October, and he also makes the point that it’s MANO that’s going to determine whether NFV means anything or is just a media hype wave. Without MANO, NFV is really just hosting stuff and hoping for the best.
But will MANO make money? It’s a software function, it could be done largely with open-source tools, it’s complicated to do and to sell. At the end of the day, NFV will shift capex from devices to servers, which means that it’s the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) that matters commercially. The fact that servers are the winner in NFV isn’t lost on the vendors, who have jumped out to support the NFVI foundation of NFV and largely ignored the critical MANO layer. Why? Because if they try to drive their own MANO strategy they’ll alienate other potential NFV partners who also have one.
Most network equipment vendors don’t have servers (Cisco being the obvious exception). What they do have is a reservoir of network functionality and an understanding of management and orchestration. They’re also network incumbents. So does a server vendor field their own complete NFV strategy, one that would compete with the network vendors who might do the same? That could be a risk.
The flip side is that if everyone decides that NFVI makes money and nobody wants to take MANO risk, NFV never develops at all because its critical core logic isn’t done. You can’t compete for a market that doesn’t exist, and without MANO the value propositions for NFV cannot be satisfied, period. In the days of the Mercury Astronauts in the US Space Program there was a saying, “No bucks, no Buck Rodgers”. That meant that without funding there’s no revolution. In NFV, it means that without compelling benefits all the PoCs we have now are just science projects.
A Wind River/HP alliance could change that. The closer we get to somebody packaging NFV as a complete product, the more likely it is that others in the market will take notice and respond. A good example is the NFV ISG and OPNFV activities, both of which got mired in the bottom-up problem I’ve described many times. Will the vendors/operators who make up these activities stand by while one solution is articulated by a credible pair of vendors and then runs away with the market? Maybe we’ll see some real movement toward useful dialog.
Of course, I have to address the “and maybe not” side. If you read the press release on the alliance, it headlines “HP and Wind River Partner to Create Carrier Grade HP Helion OpenStack Solutions for NFV” but the details are about offering Wind River stuff as an option in Helion OpenStack. NFV is the stated target, but there’s nothing about cooperating on MANO, at least not yet. It would be fairly easy for this alliance to fall into the “attractive billboard” model, something to get publicity for everyone but something that generates little progress toward really getting NFV deployed.
For that, the big test is still the test of management. Orchestration isn’t a concept new to NFV; every DevOps tool ever developed is arguably an orchestration strategy, and the TOSCA standard I believe is the best model for NFV services was generated for the cloud. The question is how far orchestration will go. Will we virtualize resources alone, or will we virtualize everything including management models, views, and process relationships?
In the virtual world of the future, things like “OSS”, “BSS”, “NMS”, “NOC”, and “MIB” don’t exist except as instantiated abstractions. We atomize everything and assemble what we need from the pool of stuff that creates, “everything” here includingoffer all the tools we need to build cloud services, NFV, SDN, and pretty much everything else. NFV didn’t invent MANO, but it described a management/orchestration mission that should have given us a glimpse of what MANO could, or should, or even must, mean. If that vision is realized, the vision will transform networking and pull along new technologies like SDN and NFV because it enables them.
So what we have to look for here from our Grand Alliance for NFV is whether the allies see the potential. They have a big head start because they have MANO and also have a credible framework for creating functionally composed services and service/operations processes. You can’t have orchestra music without a conductor. But you also need music and musicians, and we’ll have to wait to see whether HP and Wind River—and Intel behind the latter—are really determined to move the ball, not only for NFV but for the whole of the virtualization revolution. It could happen.