"Once you have your switch virtualized, you can pretty much do whatever you want with it," says Rackspace chief technology officer John Engates. "You can route traffic however you like, and you can reprogram it whenever you like, on the fly."
VMware says it is also offering network virtualization, and others companies, including Cisco, say they too are developing similar technology. "[Software-defined networking] is a very big passion and focus area for us on our infrastructure side," says VMware chief technology officer Steve Herrod. But Casado and his Nicira cohort, former Cisco exec Alan Cohen, insist that no other company is anywhere close to doing what Nicira is doing.
Virtual Servers, Virtual Storage, and, Yes, Virtual NetworksNicira's platform is particularly useful to an outfit like Rackspace. Following in the footsteps of Amazon, Rackspace operates an "infrastructure cloud," offering instant access to virtual servers and storage. This service is used by thousands of developers and businesses across the globe, and Nicira provides a means restricting each customer to its own virtual network – or multiple virtual 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 Rackspace's John Engates. "Nicira gives us the ability to put any customer, any end point, any location on one common virtual network."
Raymie Stata, the former Yahoo chief technology officer, agrees that Nicira changes the game if you're running this sort of infrastructure cloud service. But he questions how useful the company's software will be to other web services. "If you want to have virtual private networks for a large number of customers, that's one of the hardest problems to solve, and Nicira is a great solution for that," Stata says. "But if only one tenant is using a network, even if the tenant is very large, it's less useful. I wouldn't imagine it would be as useful to Facebook, for example. They're very large, but they're the only tenant on their network."
>"If you want to have virtual private networks for a large number of customers, that's one of the hardest problems to solve, and Nicira is a great solution for that"
According to Casado, this misses the mark. Many of the biggest web operations run extremely complex operations, he says, and though the resources may not be shared among many outside customers, they're shared among many different applications within a company. "Some of the big web guys have very simple operations. They have one website that runs the same code. This isn't an obvious fit for us," Casado says. "However, any sophisticated website generally has many applications with different requirements, as well as test and development [applications] from different groups, all using the same infrastructure."
As John Engates points out, at a company like Google, the company's private infrastructure operates much like the public infrastructure services offered by Amazon and Rackspace. All of these companies have built sweeping operations that pool a massive collection of hardware resources into one coherent whole. That's what a cloud is. You can grab virtual processing power and virtual storage whenever you need it, and you can move these virtual resources from one physical place to another. But in the past, the network wasn't as malleable, and this restricted how easily you could move resources. Nicira adds the missing piece.
The End of the Network OperatorMany of the world's largest web companies, including Google, are already buying cut-rate networking gear directly from manufacturers in Taiwan and China, making an end-run around the Ciscos and the Junipers. With Nicira providing a virtual networking platform that works with any gear from any vendors, Casado says, this trend will only continue. The Ciscos and Junipers, he says, will become less and less important.
Yes, Cisco is working on its own network virtualization tools. And it has joined Nicira and others in building a networking virtualization framework for OpenStack, the open source platform for building infrastructure clouds along the lines of those offered by Rackspace and Amazon. "Cisco is a networking company, and we're increasingly looking at cloud services. We’re not just switches and routers anymore," says Lew Tucker, who oversaw the development of Sun Microsystems' cloud service before it was sold to Oracle and now runs Cisco's OpenStack efforts. "We want to make sure this stuff works on Cisco gear."
>"Cisco is a networking company, and we're increasingly looking at cloud services. We’re not just switches and routers anymore. We want to make sure this stuff works on Cisco gear"
But Casado believes Cisco and the other big networking vendors will never fully commit to network virtualization. "The traditional networking vendors? I don’t think they can do this, because they'll end up cannibalizing themselves," he says. "They can do something that has some of the same properties, but they can’t actually virtualize the network. They can never come out and sell you a project that will allow you do work with any type of hardware. They will make motions in this area, but I don’t think they’re going to be doing anything really concrete."
Whatever the case, Casado believes it's only a matter of time before networking hardware takes a back seat to software.
Recently, Casado was in Hawaii when he received an e-mail from someone who worked for a large company Nicira had dealt with in the past. This person asked Casado if he could meet for a chat, and Casado said yes, assuming he was an executive who wanted to discuss a partnership between the two companies. But as it turns out, this person was an ordinary network hardware operator who had read about Nicira and wanted to know if he would be out of job in 10 years.
"I didn't know what to tell him. Get a new job? Do something different?" Casado says. "The truth is, in 10 years, you’re not going to have highly skilled, highly paid people working with networking hardware."
Additional reporting by Robert McMillan.
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