Organizations Can Be Twice As Secure at Half the Cost

Last week at VMworld, Pat Gelsinger made a statement that got folks buzzing. During his keynote, he said that integrating security into the virtualization layer would result in organizations being twice as secure at half the cost. As a long-time security guy, statements like that can seem a little bold, but VMware has data, and some proven capability here in customer environments.

We contend that the virtualization layer is increasingly ubiquitous. It touches compute, network, and storage – connects apps to infrastructure – and spans data center to device. More importantly, virtualization enables alignment between the things we care about (people, apps, data) and the controls that can protect them (not just the underlying infrastructure).

Let me speak to the statement from the data center network side with some real data. VMware has a number of VMware NSX customers in production that have deployed micro-segmentation in their data centers.  Here’s what we found:

1. 75% of data center network traffic is East-West, moving VM to VM regardless of how convoluted the path may be.
2. Nearly all security controls look exclusively at North-South traffic, which is the traffic moving into and out of the data center; 90% of East-West traffic never Continue reading

VMware NSX 6.2: Enterprise Automation, Security and Application Continuity

VMworld 2015 in San Francisco marks the two-year anniversary of the launch of VMware NSX. Since we originally launched, we have taken the promise of NSX and turned it into a platform that customers around the world are using to transform the operations of their data center networks and security infrastructure – in fact, more than 700 customers have chosen NSX. We also have more than 100 production deployments, and more than 65 customers have invested more than $1M of their IT budgets in NSX. We’ve trained more than 3,500 people on NSX, and we have more than 20 interoperable partner solutions generally available and shipping today.

Perhaps what’s most exciting is that at this year’s show, we will have more than two dozen NSX customers represented in various forums throughout the event. Organizations such as Baystate Health, City of Avondale, ClearDATA, Columbia Sportswear, DirecTV, FireHost, George Washington University, Heartland Payment Systems, IBM, IlliniCloud, NovaMedia, Rent-A-Center, Telstra, Tribune Media, United Health Group, University of New Mexico…the list goes on.

And as the capstone, we get to debut VMware NSX 6.2 at the show. So let’s take a deeper look at what we’ve learned from our customers and what’s new Continue reading

3 Ways To Get Started With VMware NSX

Over the past 12 months, VMware NSX momentum has continued to grow, as we’ve added new platform capabilities, expanded our partner ecosystem, and of course, had more than 250+ customers purchase NSX for deployment. And as interest in VMware NSX has grown with both customers and IT professionals looking to evolve their careers by adding certification in network virtualization, one of the most common questions that we get is “How can I get started with NSX?.”

We understand that there is a strong demand for individuals and organizations to get their hands on the NSX technology. Many of you are working towards your initial VCP-NV certification. Others of you are exploring NSX as a way to improve your organization’s agility and security while reducing overall costs.

Here are three ways individuals and companies can get started with NSX.

Complete NSX: Install, Configure, Manage Training – for individuals on the NSX career path, we offer “NSX: Install, Configure, Manage” training.  We are offering ICM training as part of our On-Demand Curriculum, or you can take a 5-day instructor led course. Here is the detailed course description and class schedule. ICM training is a pre-requisite for VMware NSX certification. Once Continue reading