ForeThought - RCV Innovations

I have been working for a new age service provider for over 3 years. Since last 2 years, I am part of the team responding to RFP's for modernizing major service provider networks including staging, testing and deployment of 4G/LTE services.I have been following the 4G/LTE trends at TMForum and other related information sources since then. History ======== In the mid-70's Telecom networks underwent a important change, they introduced the common channel signalling to break-away from physical network path to virtualizing the call setup. This was enabled by a relatively open standard called Signaling System No. 7 (SS7). According to Wikipedia - "SS7 is a set of telephony signaling protocols which are used to set up most of the world's public switched telephone network telephone calls. The main purpose is to set up and tear down telephone calls. Other uses include number translation, prepaid billing mechanisms, short message service (SMS), and a variety of other mass...

Our team had the good fortune of finishing the first vBlock deployment today as a Lab environment of a major Service Provider. Without Prior knowledge of Flexpod, we suggested adding dedicated Nexus Nexus 5500 based Access layer with L3 capability to vBlock for completeness of their Private Cloud Requirement. Incidentally the Launch of FlexPod today with integrated Nexus 5500/1010 along with UCS and Netapp 3000 Series came as a good surprise and Qualified our approach in terms of Bill of Material for Private cloud. We still donot see any L3 capabilities, Security and Application networking built-in. The Value of Private cloud deployments is the power of simplicity through stack standardization and while maitainting the performance, reliability and security of a vertically integrated infrastructure. Ideally intelligent non-it components such as switched pdu's, mini-VESDA and sensor networks need to be integrated in the hardware layer. The orchestration and management sta...

The Traditional Definition of information in the Enterprise is changing from simple unstructured and Structured ASCII Data to more broader binary formats. In the era where almost every business class mobile device is sensor-enabled, connected and Video capable. This popularity of embedding complex sensors, displays and end-effectors in to mobile devices is creating new and interesting Data collection and anlaysis use cases. The proliferation of sensor-enabled data-rich, video and voice capabilities into the business workflows is only a matter of time. Before too long we will see emergence of voice and video streaming functions becoming main stream information source. Transcribing and annotating audio/video streams enable easy indexing and search capabilities. The Data corellated from embedded sensors and sensor network will add a dimension to voice and video data to make it context and location aware. The Broadcast(like youTube), multi-cast(like netflix) and conference(webex) capabilit...

Cisco's Announcement to acquire Line sider is interesting to say least. The Approach of dynamically creating VLAN based on User Roles and tearing them down is a very interesting use case for Network Automation, this idea of very powerful when you look at the big picture of cloud workloads from virtual machine perspective. A better use case for Policy based Networks is to identify Virtual machine with a Certificate and Mac address on wakeup and by doing do the policy lookup/LDAP magic, the associated Nexus 1000v port can be configured to belong to the correct vlan. All in all it is nice story to follow... LineSider - Cisco Acquisition