Network Virtualization Tech: Will Nicira Compete with Cisco and Juniper?
By Dennis Kuba
April 18, 2012
April 18, 2012
- Nicira, “the most intriguing startup in Silicon Valley” according to Wired, has created a network virtualization technology that enables companies to program their networks as they do with server virtualization.
- The technology runs on top of any network hardware which is used only to move network packets. The network virtualization software provides all the intelligence allowing one to reconfigure the network infrastructure. Thus, rather than be locked into a specific network configuration, the entire network architecture can be altered in software rather than hardware to fit the current requirements.
- Nicira’s Open vSwitch goes beyond OpenFlow, which requires vendors to incorporate the protocol in their hardware. It can work with any network gear, even inexpensive hardware.
- Companies like Google, AT&T, eBay, NTT, Fidelity and Rackspace are already using Nicira to manage their networks.
- “We have hundreds of thousands of customers, and that translates into multiple hundreds of thousands of network or network segments that customers want to create,” says John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, which is currently using the Nicira platform for a beta version of its cloud service. “Nicira gives us the ability to put any customer, any end point, any location on one common virtual network.”
- Google is already buying inexpensive network hardware from Taiwan and China, thus bypassing more expensive options from Cisco and Juniper. Martin Casado, Nicira’s CTO, thinks over time that network hardware will become less important compared to the network software.
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