The sliced network: Even better than sliced bread.

For CSPs, the ability to create end-to-end slices in a virtualised network - be that on the radio side, the near or far edge or in the packet core - will be vital to future success, customer satisfaction and profitability. As Constantine Polychronopoulos explains, for VMware, the definition of existing infrastructure includes on-premises equipment as well as the involvement of public cloud providers and he emphasises it is an inevitability that, in future, CSP infrastructure will be based in and on hybrid, multi-cloud networks.

Soon, he says, operators will be able to on-board MVNOs and allow them to further slice their own networks which will be a fully software-defined and virtualised network tier or slice that is realised on a CSPs virtual infrastructure. He adds that the technologies to enable such a scenario are maturing now and will be available soon so that, in the near future, CSPs will be able to offer new business models and also to address the disparate use cases of IoT in a very efficient manner by tiering the services they offer to each particular individual case whilst managing and providing complete visibility to any and all of the different tenants in a multi-tenanted network.

Constantine Polychronopoulos accepts that distributed data management in a distributed multi-cloud environment still presents some challenges and he points in particular to the orchestration of workloads across highly-distributed clouds and ensuring the automatic and optimal placement of VNFs to ensure that compute and storage facilities are provisioned exactly where an app or service requires them to be.

He further adds that as 5G proliferates, network slicing will become utterly essential and also points out that unless 5G networks can instantly tailor connectivity, bandwidth and services to any specific use case, which is what the enterprise and consumer sectors have been led to believe the new technology will routinely provide, user expectations will be dashed and it will be the CSPs that will suffer the inevitable backlash.

Filmed at DSP Leaders Forum 2019