ons-accelerate-workshop-amazingly.html

---
url: /2015/02/ons-accelerate-workshop-amazingly/
title: "ONS Accelerate Workshop: Amazingly Refreshing"
date: "2015-02-11T19:38:00.000+01:00"
tags: [ SDN ]
---

<p>Sometimes the stars do align: Open Networking Summit organized their <a href="http://www.opennetsummit.org/ons-accelerate-feb15.php">Service Provider Accelerate Workshop</a> just a day prior to Network Field Day, so I had the fantastic opportunity to attend both.</p>
<p>I didn’t know what to expect from an event full of SDN/NFV thought leaders, and was extremely pleasantly surprised by the amount of realistic down-to-earth information I got.<!--more--></p>
<p>As always, there was the usual group of people reinventing old wheels, and the occasional vendor pitches, but there was also occasional pure gold, including:</p>
<ul class="ListParagraph"><li>Amin Vahdat from Google telling us how the server/OS industry still doesn’t have a large-scale cluster OS management solution 30 years after they started talking about replacing mainframes with workstation clusters – a refreshing reminder amid the usual yammering about networking being stuck in the past. Some hard-to-do things take time;</li>
<li>Al Blackburn from AT&amp;T explaining how they started their Domain 2.0 project by focusing on transformation on their internal habits, processes and culture, and major retraining efforts – obviously at least some people agree with my “<a href="/2014/09/youve-been-doing-same-thing-for-last-20/"><em>the technology won’t save you</em></a>” mantra;</li>
<li>Yukio Ito from NTT describing the OpenFlow-related problems they encountered in their deployment (not surprisingly, mostly aligned with what I was telling you in the <a href="http://www.ipspace.net/OpenFlow_Deep_Dive">OpenFlow Deep Dive webinar</a>, although they did discover a few additional glitches);</li>
<li>Damascene Joachimpillai from Verizon explaining their reservations about scalability of OpenFlow and the viability of service chaining favored by most NFV proponents;</li>
<li>Albert Greenberg from Microsoft Azure talking about their implementation of <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/219695/sigcomm2014-statesman.pdf">Network-State Management Service</a>;</li>
<li>Multiple speakers focusing on the lack of NFV orchestration, and lack of integration with OSS/BSS systems;</li>
</ul>
<p>Was it worth attending the workshop? Absolutely. ONS team did a fantastic job. Thank you!!!</p>