One of the things that has always been clear to us is that a pragmatic cloud and virtualization solution is going to need to embrace diversity. There were going to be many paths to cloud and customers would want the freedom to choose to host workloads on physical infrastructure, any of the hypervisors available or one of the emerging number of cloud options. This realization has been one of the factors that has shaped our strategy for delivering practical solutions for virtualization and cloud to the market.
Cloud Networking: Multi-Hypervior and Multi-Service
Initially, we focused on physical/virtual consistency and separation of duties. We kicked this effort off with the Nexus 1000V, which was a fully functioning NX-OS switch rendered fully in software. With L2 handled, we moved on to deploy virtual services consistent with this physical counterparts like the ASA 1000V, the Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) and vWAAS. Finally, we fleshed out the networking stack with the Cloud Services Router (CRS 1000V).
The network has always been a platform for enabling heterogeneous OS and heterogeneous applications to connect. Naturally, the next step was to take the capabilities we had built and extend them across multiple hypervisors so we could now deliver a consistent experience for customers with heterogeneous hypervisor environments. We built on our success with over 6,000 enterprise and service provider VMware vSphere customers and are now extending those came capabilities to Microsoft Hyper-V environments as well for Xen and KVM open source hypervisors. With the recently announced shift to a “freemium” pricing model, with the Nexus 1000V-Essential Edition, customers are gaining these benefits with minimal cost and risk.
vCider and Virtuata: Opportunity for Secure Multi-cloud Networking
However, some of the most interesting progress has come from our two of our more recent acquisitions that have been centered on the concept of providing better operations and management of multi-cloud environments. As customers more broadly adopt cloud and virtualization, security and isolation at the VM level become of paramount importance. To address this need we acquired Virtuata this summer. The Virtuata technology will give us (okay, you) the ability to have sophisticated and consistent security for VMs across multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud environments.
Tags: Cloud Computing, Hyper-V, KVM, Nexus 1000v, OpenStack, security, VMware vSphere, Xen
