Over the year or so that we've been downing these pints of beer in homage to the great detective Sherlock Holmes and his now forbidden tobacco pipe, the SDN/NFV movement that we've been discussing has taken centre-stage. Where, at the start of our drinking sessions we pondered the now profound telco acceptance of software-driven technology (acceptance, that is, in the telco boiler room - the telco board room was already on-message), now it's all about the detail.

There are still problems but they concern the 'how to' rather than the 'should we?'

In this final problem-solving session, Martin Taylor, CTO of Metaswitch Networks, in company with TelecomTV's Ian Scales and Martyn Warwick ponder the acceptance gained by 'open source' in the telco industry and tackle a collection of what can only really be described as half pint problems. For instance... watch out for big differences in commodity server performance. Compatibility may be a problem too as there's no nice, clean boundary between the VNF (virtual network function) and the underlying platform, there may need to be bits of software in the VNF that are interdependent on bits of software on the platform in order to get the required performance... and more. 

We hope you've found these '2 Pint' sessions as useful as we found them enjoyable.