The interest being shown in ONOS’s CORD architecture (see this Light Reading piece) isn’t a surprise to me (see my own blog on it here) but it’s an indication that CORD might be even more influential because of a singular fact—integration and “packaged solutions” are much more in CORD’s DNA. I don’t agree that it’s a simple cloud CO in a box, but it’s much closer to that than even most proprietary strategies would offer. That could be important in populizing cloud support of operator transformation. I referenced my prior blog for those who’d like a digest of what CORD and related technologies (ONOS and XOS) are, so I can jump off from a technology summary without repeating it.
Redefining the CO in cloud terms, meaning applying virtualization principles to its infrastructure and services, is a useful way of positioning network evolution. Adopting SDN or NFV might sound exciting, but for network operators you have to look at the end game, meaning what you’d end up with. Enterprises have built their IT architectures from data centers, and operators have built their networks from “serving offices”, the most common of which are the central offices that form the operators’ edge. That’s a big factor in CORD’s acceptance, but we’re starting to see another factor.
SDN and NFV are both incomplete architectures, meaning that they don’t define enough of the architectural framework to cement their own benefit case. In fact, neither really defines enough of the management framework in which they’d have to operate to make operators comfortable with SLA management, and NFV doesn’t define the execution framework for virtual functions either.
The fashionable thing to worry about in that situation is that you’d end up with “pre-standard” implementation. In the real world of SDN and NFV the real risk is that you end up in a black hole of integration. There are too many players and pieces to be fitted, and the chances of them forming a useful infrastructure that makes the benefit case is near zero unless somebody jiggles all the pieces till they fall into place. That’s what CORD proposes to do, at least in part.
A cloud-adapted CO is by definition integrated; COs are facilities after all. ONOS and CORD have made integrated structures an explicit goal while SDN and NFV standards groups have really failed integration totally. However, wishing won’t make it so. CORD may make integration explicitly a goal but that doesn’t get it realized, it only focuses people on it. The first question now is how long it will take for that focus to mean something. Not the last question, though. We’ll get to that one in time.
What I’ve called VNFPaaS, the execution platform for VNFs that NFV needs desperately, is logically within CORD scope but CORD isn’t there yet. It also needs to deliver the details in the implementation of the Infrastructure Manager intent-model concept that’s critical to resource independence. Again, it’s an element that’s in-scope, which is more than we can say for SDN and NFV.
What might be helpful in getting to the right place is vendor interest in CORD as a way of packaging their own solutions. Ciena’s promise of a turnkey CORD implementation is particularly interesting given that Ciena is one of the vendors with all the pieces needed to make an SDN/NFV business case. Ciena alone could make a difference for SDN and NFV, even if its other five business-case-ready competitors don’t jump on CORD (which they should).
This is where the “how long…” question comes in, though. Another Light Reading article illustrates the growing cynicism of operators. Too much NFV and SDN hype for too long has created expectations in the CIO and CEO offices that technologists have not been able to meet. At one level the cynics are right; both technologies have been mercilessly hyped and the hypothetical (dare we say!) potential has little chance of being met in the real world. However, the success of something has to be measured, here as always, against the business case and not against conformance to fables full of sound and fury (as Shakespeare said, and perhaps tales told by idiots is also a fair parallel). Have we so poisoned the well that it no longer matters whether we can make a business case because too much is expected?
That’s the second question I promised to get to. Will SDN or NFV make the operators into OTTs? That question is asked by the second Light Reading piece, but it’s not the right one. Neither SDN nor NFV is needed to do that. Anyone can be an OTT. What’s hard is being a network operator.
Let’s forget the OTT goal and focus on reality. Operators cannot leave their space or there’s no Internet to be on top of. Operators cannot be profitable above the network they’re losing money in, while competing with others who have no such boat-anchor on their profits. Google won’t be a network operator; why would they? They’ll try to scare the media and operators into thinking they might, but they won’t. So operators are what we have left to carry the water.
SDN and NFV are not about making operators into OTTs, they’re about making networks into something that, if it’s not profitable, is at least not a boat anchor. What’s needed now is a transformation to improve profitability of network services. A lot of that has to be cost management, opex efficiency. Some can also come from redefining “services” to include higher-layer features (like IMS/EPC and CDN). Very little will come from new models of selling connection services, which is why it’s fruitless to try to change connection technology without changing connection operations economics. If it’s not cheaper there’s nothing much in connection services buyers value.
This brings us to the “best of CORD” because if we can’t create a service ecosystem into which optimized pieces can be introduced cheaply, nothing good is going to come out of either SDN or NFV. The right way to do both, top-down, was not adopted and it’s clear that rising to the top of the problem is beyond both the ONF and the ETSI ISG. All OPNFV has managed to do is create a platform for NFV to run on, without any feature value to make the business case. ONOS is at least heading in the right direction, and every vendor and operator backer takes us closer to the point where we reach a critical mass of utility.
And yet we are not there at this point, and we’re running out of time. SDN and NFV can still be redeemed—I still believe that we can extract significant value from both—but no technology is useful if it reaches its potential when its buyers have moved on. The lesson of the two Light Reading pieces is that the buyers are moving on, reluctantly. To CORD for now, which is at least SDN and NFV compatible. Eventually, if CORD can’t harness the business value of transformed data centers, to something else. In that case we will have spent a lot of time and money on nothing, and wasted an enormous opportunity.