VMware announces first Nicira-based SDN product
VMware takes its first steps into the networking market following its acquisition of the software defined networking firm Nicira.
Software defined networking (SDN) got a big new backer this week as VMware entered the market with a new solution.
Announced at its annual conference in San Francisco, VMware NSX is the first SDN product the company has launched and has been born of its $1.05bn acquisition of network virtualisation software specialists Nicira back in July 2012.
It promises the platform will deliver all networking and security needs in a software package, regardless of what hardware it is run on, offering better speed and flexibility while reducing costs.
"VMware is further empowering IT to help organisations become more agile, responsive and profitable," said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice-president of cloud infrastructure and management at VMware.
"New products such as VMware NSX will fundamentally redefine the hypervisor and its role in the datacentre,” Raghuram added.
The product is said to be similar to other VMware solutions with the vSphere tag, where the architecture is built into the hypervisor level. This means as applications need more resources, the hypervisor and networking capability will scale up simultaneously, as and when required.
Network managers can then seek what resources they need from a central pool, rather than having to provision numerous, singular networking appliances, and to increase capacity, the only thing that needs to be added is a server node.
The combination of features from VMware’s own vCloud network security product and Nicria’s network virtualisation platform (NVP), leads to the company claiming for every 32 host clusters, the NSX can deliver 1TB per second of traffic.
“We continue to evolve the software-defined datacentre architecture to address IT's critical needs,” said Raghuram. “Enabling them to build infrastructure that is radically simpler and more efficient while delivering the agility and flexibility to support the velocity of their businesses.”
The VMware NSX will launch in the fourth quarter of this year.
