It's over? Pat Gelsinger's post vSphere VMware NSX-T opportunity VMware has recently announced its financial results for 2016, and for a company that's not just satured but that leads the VM market, it had a very good year. Some of this is attributed to accepting that VMware can't beat AWS, so it might as well join them. But VMware's NSX Network Virtualization arguably led the way, doubling …
The problem is that NSX and it's derivatives is entirely based on virtualized environments. But, at least in the SMB world, much of the infrastructure still runs on real iron. Therefore NSX represents only a partial solution. We told VMWare this several months ago and got a mostly ho-hum response: "We don't do that and it's not on the road map."
At best, NSX is a partial solution to the requirements for network security at all levels of the network. However, the only other players are networking companies which, while they do a decent job at the network switch and router level, their virtualized security solutions are cumbersome. too complicated to use, and produce a serious latency in communication becase of the requirement to hairpin all communication through a real network device.
We're looking for a good universal solution. The company that can produce a unified security solution that runs in both the network hardware AND the hypervisor stands to be a real winner. However, it doesn't look like anyone even recognizes the need.
And also where we can introduce machine intelligence to spot the "wait, what?" moments in that combined physical and virtual superset network. While it won't likely catch all instances of improper communication on the networks now, a toe in the door is better than the status quo and based on situations where I've done such work before, likely to only improve with age.
I work for VMware and recently had a customer purchase network hardware from Big Switch (sold to them by Dell.) Big switch runs a framework called Big Cloud Fabric which integrates natively with SDN including NSX. This might be the universal type solution you are looking for. Here's a link to read more: http://www.bigswitch.com/bringing-physical-network-automation-and-visibility-to-vmware-virtualization-environments
I work for Illumio. In contrast to VMware NSX, Illumio is built to deliver universal security for infrastructure environments with VM, real iron (baremetal), containers, switches, and cloud security groups (AWS and Azure) - and works in/across any environment (data center, private and public cloud).
Nice article Trevor, a lot packed in there. Let us know when you finish your week long treatise on security we would all enjoy reading it. It is hard for me seeing Vmware making such a hard turn on their strategy, even if the technology for it is right in front of them. I read your note right after I read an old register story about the possible demise of Solaris. I was at Sun working on Solaris in the 90s when it could have ruled the world and Linux would have had no reason for being, had we only been truly committed to being an operating system company. Solaris could have been the ubiquitous platform for the cloud for everyone and every platform, and I truely believe Sun would still exist as an independent company today if it had only.... Us in the subsidiary talk often how we should be spun out, but Sun was doing too well (like Vmware Now). Flush with success from Hardware business and the inability to let go of the bone we had in our mouth it was never to be.
Of course this seems to fate of everyone in our industry. Maybe that's OK, clean out the old to make way for the new. If Vmware figures out how to make this transition, congrats to them, if they do they will be truly unique.
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