Summary: SDN/NFV industry is moving towards tipping point and year 2015 could be the year of SDN/NFV. Where do industry leaders see SDN/NFV reaching in coming year? Cyan, the leader in network transformation, seems quite optimistic and provided below prediction for Network Infra and SDN/NFV Industry.
Top Infrastructure Predictions for 2015
- 100G coherent and WSS begin to hit their stride in Metro/Regional and Data Center Interconnect (DCI) networks – driven by increasingly competitive pricing for DSPs and transceivers.
- Deployment of white-box and “brite-box” systems based on best-in-breed COTS components continue to gain traction with both carriers and data centers, helping to disintegrate the router market faster than previously predicted
- Hyperscale Cloud and Internet Content Providers increasingly go their own way – purchasing optical IRTUs and dark fiber to upgrade and expand their own private DCI networks. These networks account for more than 50{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} of total network interconnect capacity for the first time in 2015
- As attention moves from hardware to software development and operations (DevOps), lower cost packet switching in data centers, plus the high cost and complexity of taming scale in the IPV6 Internet, drives network operators to data center hosted solutions, interconnected by agile optical networks.
Top SDN/NFV Predictions for 2015
- Virtualized CPE (vCPE) will be the first NFV use case deployed in a production environment, as a means to develop new enterprise managed services/revenue. Meanwhile, more complex use cases such as IMS and EPC, where arguably NFV can have the most impact in terms of cost savings, will likely continue in PoC mode
- The orchestration space will become more crowded as numerous standalone and vendor-specific solutions continue to emerge. Differentiation will increasingly be based on an ability to simplify end-to-end orchestration of physical and virtual resources in multi-vendor environments and across multiple domains
- Carriers double down on data center investments, and new DevOps personnel accrue power over strategic direction. Telcos work on defining new products and services based on Telco Cloud
- As single-application Web 2.0 companies peak, the commoditization of cloud infrastructure platforms like OpenStack enables an explosion of new cloud-based services and applications. Operators and vendors that cannot or will not evolve to support this web-scale paradigm will continue to struggle in 2015.
