What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2012? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
2012 Prediction - Networking Invades The Server
Contributed
Article by Kelly Herrell, CEO, Vyatta
By the end of 2011 Gartner claimed virtualization
is now at a tipping point with roughly 50% of all x86 workloads running as a
virtual machine. This is fundamentally altering
the flow of network traffic, and forces much of the networking and security
control to be conducted within the virtualized server itself.
Think about the tremendous amount of traffic
flowing within the virtualized infrastructure. As a rule of thumb each VM can generate
100Mb/s of traffic, and in many cases that VM is communicating with another VM
in the same server. Multiply this
dynamic by the fact that servers have become so powerful that they can host a
large number of VMs. No wonder so much
traffic is generated by virtualized environments.
However, Gartner estimates that today only 5%
of security controls in the Enterprise Datacenter are virtualized. Given that half of the x86 workloads are now
VMs, security and networking naturally and necessarily will extend into the
server infrastructure itself.
It's time for network architectures to catch
up to virtualization, and 2012 is the year.
The adoption of network virtual machines will happen across the
industry, and quickly:
-
Private Clouds will adopt network
virtual machines to logically segment different BUs within shared
infrastructure.
-
Public Clouds will enable network VMs
so customers can resolve their greatest security fears, since the service
provider will not change their fixed infrastructure for each customer.
-
Hybrid Clouds are simply a combination
of the Public and Private dynamics, with the added adoption driver being the
fact that by using network VMs the customer can have a common infrastructure
type in all locations, and under their control.
At the end of the day it doesn't matter if
it's a virtualized datacenter or full cloud architecture: If the infrastructure has hundreds or
thousands of VMs generating traffic there needs to be appropriate controls and
policies in place. The effective and
efficient way to do that is with network virtual machines.
###
About
the Author
As CEO and member of
the Board of Directors, Kelly provides the strategic leadership and vision for
Vyatta and drives it through to rapid execution. Kelly has a proven track
record for growing companies based on open source in the systems, embedded and
telephony industries. Before joining Vyatta, Kelly was the SVP of Strategic
Operations at MontaVista Software, the world's pre-eminent embedded Linux
supplier, where he led the strategic focus into telecommunications equipment
and mobile phones. Kelly holds a Bachelor's Degree with
Honors in Marketing from Washington State University, and an MBA from Cornell
University.