VMware sees NSX adoption as critical to private cloud strategy

From a business perspective, NSX is a fast-growing technology for VMware. It initially built its company on server virtualization, but now it is a cloud infrastructure and business mobility company. Anand Patil, India Lead - SDDC Sales - VMware India feels that network virtualization is a bigger opportunity than server virtualization and it will continue to be in the world of cross cloud, where customers will run their workloads and applications across multiple clouds and at the same time manage, connect and secure them all - 

Organizations worldwide are realizing the urgency of transforming their IT infrastructure to meet challenges of working across public and private clouds, improving security, and meeting new regulatory requirements. The networking world is undergoing a seismic shift from hardware to software-defined models. Just as virtualization transformed physical servers in a previous generation, it is now driving network transformation and enabling the emergence of cloud-based business models.

VMware NSX (network virtualization and security platform) is a non-disruptive solution that is deployed on any IP network, including existing data center network designs or next generation fabric architectures from any networking vendor. The NSX network virtualization platform for VMware is the central product in the network virtualization domain that provides the critical third pillar to its Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture. Last year VMware exceeded 600 million dollar bookings.

“NSX network virtualization delivers for networking what VMware has already delivered for compute and storage. It enables virtual networks to be created, saved, deleted and restored on demand without requiring any reconfiguration of the physical network. This provides the ability to tie security policies on a per app basis. Whether the app is running on a vSphere VM, natively in Amazon or Azure or one of the cloud datacenters or even if the app is in a container and tied to the container or applications – the whole point is that regardless of where the application is running or in what kind of framework, NSX incorporates built-in security to be able to apply very fine grained policies to protect those applications,” says Anand Patil, India Lead - SDDC Sales – VMware.

Opportunities galore in NSX...

Being a new technology, NSX has pretty high level of services attached with typical sale as customers need professional services to help them deploy it right the first time around. “This is a clear opportunity for our partners to get the services business. If a partner is already selling VMware’s virtualization technology, it gives them access to additional spends. If they are an existing networking partner, NSX gives them access to the customer’s security budget, which is the fastest growing budget in IT today,” says Anand.

For VMware’s solution provider partners, there are pull-through opportunitiesto help customers integrate NSX into their private clouds and to make it even easier for customers to take advantage of hybrid and public cloud environments– while maintaining the same security and networking policies across multiple clouds. By virtualising the network with NSX, it smoothens the transfer of workloads from one environment to another, and paves way to unlock the full potential of the SDDC. NSX provides inherent security so when an application moves – security moves with it – across any cloud. 

“We are seeing broad adoption of NSX, and it is our partners that are driving this adoption. Adoption of SDDC by our vCloud Air Network service provider partners continues to accelerate given the success our partners have with core products like vSphere,” cites Anand. 

In the last 12 months, NSX adoption has become an integral part of the private cloud build-out in large banks, conglomerates and telecoms within the ITeS segment to implement security with digital workspaces. VMware expects this trend to extend to smaller organizations in these segments as well. Given the heightened awareness around cyber-security, VMware is also starting to see Government and PSUs take a keen interest in the micro-segmentation capabilities of NSX, which provides a way to mitigate malware from spreading within virtualized data centers. 

Challenges addressed by NSX

• Security – NSX enables organizations to divide the data center into distinct security segments logically, down to the level of the individual workload-irrespective of the workload’s network subnet or VLAN. IT teams can then define security policies and controls for each workload based on dynamic security groups, which ensures immediate responses to threats inside the data center and enforcement down to the individual virtual machine. Unlike in traditional networks, if an attacker gets through data center perimeter defenses, threats cannot move laterally within the data center. This can help mitigate the propagation of malware within the data center.

• Automation – NSX addresses the challenge of lengthy network provisioning, configuration errors, and costly processes by automating labor intensive, error-prone tasks. NSX creates networks in software, eliminating bottlenecks associated with hardware based networks

• Application Continuity – Since NSX abstracts networking from the underlying hardware, networking and security policies are attached to their associated workloads. Organizations can easily replicate entire application environments to remote data centers for disaster recovery, move them from one corporate data center to another, or deploy them into a hybrid cloud environment-all in minutes, all without disrupting the applications, and all without touching the physical network