Top 100 Electronics,China Electric Tools

Brian Levy, EMEA SP Sector CTO, myself in SP Solutions Marketing and other colleagues at Juniper have been around, meeting with Service Providers around Europe Middle East and Africa, talking about SDN and NFV, both, very hot topics. I recently had a chance to sit with Brian to exchange our experiences that you can see in the video here.

First, what our customers really wanted to know about it, is what SDN and NFV really means… but beyond the  hype of those new topics, Service Providers are really interested to know what’s in SDN and NFV for them. And as I wrote in my previous blog, this was the case as well at Broadband World Forum. The second question we usually get is around what Juniper brings to the SDN world and here we also have some exiting news around Contrail’s support in multiple hypervisors and the new Juniper Metafabric architecture.

The best way to understand the advantages that SDN and NFV brings, is to talk about different use-cases that help SPs to generate new revenue. The first one we discuss in the video is around providing more agile services on top of the traditional connectivity thanks to virtualizing certain network functions, starting from transforming the traditional enterprise CPE into a virtual CPE (or vCPE). The second use case for SDN is to help Service Providers to get inserted into the Cloud value chain, highlighting the value of the Network, the service wrap with single point of contact and finally the compliance to have the data in the right place. This last use-case is explained with details at this video-blog by Chloe Ma:  Building Elastic, Adaptive and Secure Enterprise Private Cloud with Contrail  

However, there is a big obstacle in adopting SDN and NFV by service providers, and it is not technical. Those disruptive technologies go across organizational boundaries, is it under CTO or CIO organizations? I remember writing about a similar cross-organizational boundary issue created by the introduction of MPLS directly over optical layers; that time, Kireeti Kompella named it The Purple Line, do you remember it? Most SPs went through an organizational transformation to be able to embrace it... a kind of Déjà vu?

                                  

Those Service providers that don’t react to the SDN technology and don’t create an organization that embraceit are really going to suffer in the next few years. SDN will be the platform that enables both: much greater network efficiency and much greater service capabilities, and Service providers really needs them.

                             Get your organizations ready and let’s embrace SDN!

View the original article here

We all know SDN is a big subject, to be honest it seems to be the only topic at the moment. So when you’re set the challenge of talking about it for just sixteen minutes where do you start? Well, at Broadband World Forum, Brian Levy (CTO, Service Provider, EMEA) was asked to do just that as an introduction to a series of workshops. We’ve recorded his presentation, Transforming the Service Landscape with Virtualization, for you to view – it’s 16 minutes well spent.

So how does Brian approach the subject? First off he draws a distinction between SDN and NFV (Network Functions Virtualization). Brian positions SDN as the centralised resilient brain that uses network intelligence to control virtualised functions. In other words it’s the combination of SDN and NFV that delivers greatest benefit. He sums this up rather neatly when he says “centralise what you can, distribute what you must.”

Brian provides context by talking us through a short history of virtualization in the datacenter environment. He takes us through openflow and onto the proactive overlay networks of today of which JuniperContrail is a great example. But Brian talks of the legacy network as a world of physical boxes and goes on to present a vision where functions such as firewalls, DPI, and BRAS for example, are run in virtual machines on a platform that enables us to create chains of services. The ability to spin up these network capabilities within seconds gives network operators a flexibility unseen before.

However, as interesting as the technology is, Brian avoids the trap of talking about the technology as an end in itself. He knows from his experience of talking to customers that what really excites them is understanding how to get the most out of SDN/NFV and exploring what it can do for them and their customers. Brian illustrates this using three separate use cases: Public and enterprise cloud federation, virtual CPE, and secure cloud brokerage.

Looking at secure cloud brokerage, Brian identifies three advantages delivered through virtualisation:

The ability to have an end-to-end application service level agreement with a single point of contact for all your network needs.The ability to offer service wraps such as a single bill or service aggregation.Trust and security. Here Brian talks about data compliance being quoted as the new number one barrier to cloud adoption and how virtualization can overcome this.

It’s probably taken me longer to type this blog than it would to watch the recording and I’ve only just scratched the surface in terms of the richness of content Brian covers. My advice is to put aside sixteen minutes, follow the link and watch the recording of his presentation first hand.

View the original article here

 
Dr. Rhett Davis

The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) has awarded Dr. Rhett Davis, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, one of two distinguished service awards at its annual conference this week.

The Distinguished Service Award to Davis is based on his ten years of support of Si2. Davis was the first academic to adopt OpenAccess into his course work and lab exercises at NC State. This served to train fresh students in this new platform and expand knowledge in this new area.

Si2 is the largest organization of industry-leading semiconductor, systems, EDA and manufacturing companies focused on the development and adoption of standards to improve the way integrated circuits are designed and manufactured, in order to speed time-to market, reduce costs, and meet the challenges of sub-micron design. Now in its 24th year, Si2 is uniquely positioned to enable timely collaboration through dedicated staff and a strong implementation focus driven by its member companies. Si2 represents nearly 100 companies involved in all parts of the silicon supply chain throughout the world

View the original article here