By Howie Xu, Director, Networking R&D, VMware Inc.
At VMworld 2010, VMware executives Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod did a great job in articulating "business agility" and "IT as a Service" vision for the "new infrastructure" we and the ecosystem are building.
The networking industry is peeling the next (networking) layer of the onion to make the vision a reality to our joint customers — there is obviously a big opportunity ahead to transform to an elastic, efficient, just-in-time, and almost invisible cloud era infrastructure.
Network virtualization is precisely a means to the end aforementioned. With network virtualization, we can help fulfill the vision of provisioning, managing, and securing application workload in an increasingly complex and scalable environment with predictable performance and with "cloud economics".
Let me show you a few introduction slides in case you missed my "vNetwork Journey" talk (a talk on technology vision NOT VMware's product roadmap).
"Your vision makes the networking interesting again", said one customer after my talk. Thank you so much for the feedback — we didn't need a full page ad on USA Today to convince our customers we are the thought leader and have the track record in this space.
VMware is not dictating whether/which network services need to run in what form factors ("virtual form factor" or not etc), whether intelligence should reside on point A vs. point B — plenty of people know how to make the right trade-off for their own products.
What we are determined to do is to have a platform to enable the "just-in-time", "nearly transparent", and "multi-tenancy friendly" infrastrucuture. As I discussed at VMworld, we have a few tricks in the bag to help to make the vision real.
At TA8361, we discussed the need for a standard management/orchestration layer so that various networking vendors can map their solutions into this uniform management layer. We also discussed the platform support for a new class of networking services that are elastic, on-demand, pay-as-you-go, multi-tenancy aware, and highly performing.
Finally, it is the "cloud" that will be driving any paradigm shift. Customers voted with their feet by spreading "cloud fever", demanding "cloud agility", and evaluating "cloud economics". VMware and its ecosystem can choose to be either the innovator or the witness.
"Water flows downhill", said one executive of a key networking vendor when we discussed the "disruption" in a casual party this week. Who is going to deny the "cloud" if it means efficiency, control, and business agility at lower cost? Have a nice ride on the vNetwork Journey!
