Network virtualisation has made the journey from concept to mainstream adoption today, and is the single greatest infrastructure transformation to date.
So said Rajiv Ramaswami, general manager and executive vice president for networking and security at VMware, during his keynote address at VMworld Europe 2016.
He said the improved security, automation, and continuity offered by VMware NSX is a key enabler, adding that NSX has seen a 400% customer growth over the past 18 months.
According to Ramaswami, despite the fact that networking has evolved over the past few years from a hardware-centric model that is a vertically-integrated, to a software-centric model, many customers continue to battle with infrastructure challenges.
"The three main challenges are security, automation and provisioning, and availability," he explained. He added that research has revealed the average cost of a data breach to be around four million euros - a conservative estimate, with some cases costing as much as a billion euro.
This is why VMware has debuted what he calls a new industry standard: NSX with micro-segmentation. "With micro-segmentation, each application gets its own firewall, that's pretty powerful," he elaborated. "In addition NSX allows users to deliver networking and security at VM speeds."
He said it has never been more important for IT to keep pace with business needs, and traditional networking has been a spanner in the works of progress. To address automation, NSX eliminates the manual intervention previously required for networking changes, allowing technology to keep in step with the business. Although provisioning the VM may only take a few minutes, before, it could take weeks to provision the network resources because networking and security aren't automated.
Application continuity and disaster recovery are also business imperatives today. Technology that can automate disaster recovery across compute and storage resources has been possible, but networking was holding it back. With NSX, application continuity is automated to ensure they are up and running all the time.
IT's goals have not altered much, and continue to focus on application security, delivery, and availability, he said. Today's businesses run applications on a number of different architectures and frameworks, including containers and public clouds. Irrespective of where those apps run VMware can manage, speed up, and secure them. Ramaswami concluded: "I invite you to join VMware on the NSX journey."
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