Cisco brings Network Functions Virtualization to the enterprise

With traditional network infrastructure, services have been tied to dedicated hardware devices. Network functions virtualization (NFV) changes this paradigm by decoupling the network functions from the underlying hardware platform.

To date, NFV has been used primarily by service providers for service chaining, but recently digital enterprises have become interested in the technology. ZK Research (I am an employee of ZK Research) data shows that 61% of organizations are investigating or have deployed Enterprise NFV.

I’ve seen many reports and articles that compare NFV and server virtualization and while I understand the comparison, there is a significant difference. Server virtualization has been used primarily to consolidate servers in the data center. While NFV has tremendous value in the data center, it can also bring value to other points in the network including the campus, branch offices and even the cloud. Also, the main value proposition of server virtualization is to lower costs but NFV can lower costs and increase the agility of network services.

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