Abstract, Automate & Secure — From Data Center to Cloud to Edge

By Milin Desai, Vice President of Products, NSBU

It feels like only yesterday when we started our journey into networking at VMware. Even from the early beginnings in 2011, it became clear to some of us that the abstraction and operations model of virtualization for compute and memory, which completely transformed the modern data center, was something we needed to extend to networking. We understood that that a network based on software and abstraction in the long run would extend beyond our customers’ data centers to public clouds and ultimately to the Edge.

We’ve been executing on this vision for almost eight years; reinventing data center networking and enabling our customers to be smarter about how they secure, manage and connect their applications and users.

Starting with the Data Center

The Nicira acquisition, alongside our internal innovations, resulted in the release of VMware NSX in 2013. VMware NSX made network virtualization a mainstream possibility for the data center. The goal was simple — abstract the application from the physical network and deliver the networking attributes in software at machine speeds. After four years, multiple thousands of customers and the creation of a billion-dollar run rate business, we have transformed the Continue reading

Software is Eating the Network: Going Native on Network Virtualization

In 2011 Marc Andreessen made his now famous statement, “Software is Eating the World”; a wild claim at the time, but one that proved to be highly prescient. This declaration has become the underpinning of how VMware delivers solutions that enable our customers to be more agile, efficient and innovative with their IT operations – through software.

When we launched our vision for a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in May of 2012, we said it would enable IT transformation through security, automation, management control, and services choice in a way that translated to greater simplicity, programmability, and consistency across various customer IT environments.  We executed on that vision in partnership with the technology and open source ecosystem so that customers would have the best of breed approach when transitioning to a modern software infrastructure.

The explosion of cloud and container services has driven a significant need for scalable, automated and policy-driven networking across heterogeneous environments in a way that can only be realized through software abstraction.  Foundational to network virtualization, the virtual switch has become a strategic component for delivering fast, agile infrastructure.

In line with how we’ve executed and delivered on our SDDC vision, we are Continue reading