SDN, NFV, and the cloud all suffer from a common challenge. You have to start somewhere and exercise prudence on creeping scope, but the changes all could make in IT/network practices are so profound that you need to look beyond early applications in search of both an architecture and a mission broad enough to cope with growth. I’ve said several times recently that current NFV projects in particular were perhaps examining the toes of the technology too much rather than stepping boldly toward the future. That puts more pressure on vendors to make that broad business case.
HP is IMHO the functional lead in NFV; their stuff is the most complete and the most credible of all the solutions I’ve examined. This week at their Discover event in Las Vegas, they opened up a bit on their vision of the future, both for their OpenNFV approach and for how NFV marries to SDN, the cloud, and future operator business models.
One of the critical issues in NFV is how NFV deployment in the explicit ETSI sense of virtual functions and hosting can be integrated with legacy elements of the same service, SDN components, and perhaps most critically operations and management systems. HP proposes this be done using a combination of “universal orchestration” and an extended model of infrastructure management.
HP’s Director has been enhanced to offer analytics integration and a dual-view option for service management or OSS/BSS versus an NFV view of management data. It’s underpinned by a universal data model for structuring services and resources alike. I like the unified approach, though I confess it might be a personal bias since I’ve not really been able to line up a divided-model approach against an equally good integrated-model approach to see if the benefits are real.
The new version of the model supports both the relatively limited MTOSI states and more generic and flexibly defined states. If you can make the former work the result is easier to integrate with TMF-level material like SID but I think that MTOSI states are probably not adequate to represent complex NFV stuff like horizontal scaling. The model also supports the notion of a “virtual VIM” that lets you model multiple options for deployment, like NFV versus legacy.
The extended infrastructure manager concept, which I’ll call “IM” just to save typing, is based on creating a unified data model to represent infrastructure that can generate services—you can model SDN, NFV, and legacy with the same model, which means that a common IM approach above the data model can link everything to higher-level functionality. It’s this approach that gives HP’s OpenNFV product breadth to address a service end-to-end.
This all links to some of the future-trend stuff. HP talked about a “service factory” and “mall” approach. Architects can assemble stuff in the service factory and wring it out, sending it to the mall for retail offers. The services can take advantage of underlying transport, higher-layer connectivity, network-related features like firewalls, network information gleaned from service operations, and data from other sources (more on this in a minute). This creates a multi-layer operator business model rooted in traditional networking and building up to a more OTT-like picture.
HP’s view is that as time goes by, NFV will become more “cloud-like”, not so much by changing any of its technologies but by supporting services and applications that evolve as operators look for new revenues—for new stuff to sell in the “mall”. They offered a vision of how that might work, too. Users, both consumer and business, are evolving their position on what “the network” has to offer them as they become more dependent on mobile devices. Mobile users move through what look like “information fields” created by their own behavior (social networking, for example) and by the sum of their environment. These fields intersect with the users’ interests to create what the HP slides call a “Decision Fabric”. From this fabric, you can build applications that support not knowledge but action, something that’s of higher value.
You can get information fields from what you already have. Location-based services are an example, and so is that social-media context. You can also visualize new developments like IoT as an information field, and in fact you can see the difference between the Decision Fabric approach and conventional IoT models pretty easily. IoT in the HP view is almost a self-organizing concept, a marriage of data from sensors and analytics presented not as a bunch of IP addresses but as a service.
In fact, they shared the architecture of their IoT solution, and that’s exactly how it works. You have a collection of devices on public or private networks that contribute to a repository of IoT knowledge that can be passed through filters in real time or in the form of analytic results. While this model is specifically aimed at IoT, HP said that it would be the general model for their drawing data into their Decision Fabric.
They also said that the OpenNFV tools would be used to deploy the components of the Decision Fabric, and that it was applications like this that would shift NFV from provisioning relatively fixed pieces of service technology to coordinating highly dynamic services. That’s where NFV is most useful of course; you don’t need a lot of service management technology to deploy something under a two-year contract.
The HP positioning on NFV, SDN, and the cloud poses an interesting challenge for the industry and for operators. It may also challenge HP itself, all because of the fact that it extends the current rather narrow notion of NFV, brings in related technologies like SDN and the cloud, and magnifies the need to orchestrate everything related to service deployment and behavior and not just virtual functions. A big story can have big benefits, but it’s also more complicated.
That’s the root of the dilemma we have with SDN, with NFV, and with the cloud. We have glorious future visions of these things and we have a generally pedestrian view of their near-term evolution. The cloud is going to change everything, yet most think of it as hosted server consolidation. SDN is a revolution, but it’s a revolutionary way of building the very same services we already consume. NFV is about orchestrating for dynamic service creation, but we think it will be dynamic creation of the very functional pieces we already have in a forty-dollar network access box you can buy at a technology store.
You can’t leap into a totally new world of networking, not in an industry with capital cycles of five to seven years on the average. But you can’t evolve by just doing the same old stuff either. I think what HP’s visions prove is that there are solutions out there that can create a real future for NFV and not just an extension of the present. That’s true for other vendors too, and so the question for the industry and the vendors may now be whether they can show buyers that future without scaring them into immobility, or whether they can lead them step by step to the right place without ever telling them just where that is. If one or the other can’t be done, then all our revolutions risk diffusing into footnotes on the technology story.