Network Virtualization : Network on Nitros

When was the last time we heard any ground breaking disruptive trend in Networking, may be a decade back .I was involved in setting up networking device back in 2006 and i recently got a chance to revisit the network design to implement a network from scratch much to my surprise i quickly found out i was not that outdated on the technology everything more or less works the same ,same VLAN, same OSPF same QoS almost all the concept stays and we do it exactly how we done it a decade back.

I do agree there are some vendor specific initiative for improving all these ,but still it remains vendor specific ,even the Openflow protocol which was supposed to be the game changer haven't change much of the game yet.

What happened now, why all these marketing terms like NFV, NV are floating around internet blogs, in short the Cloud happened .

With the invent of new cloud technologies like Openstack,AWS,Azure. Network vendors are forced to re-innovate ,they are in the stage of Innovate or peirsh.

Cloud needs Flexible and scalable networks not propitiatory ,vendor specific OS or protocols ,We design or move to cloud with the primary design goal of scalability .Consider the cost or vendor lock-in associated with this if we decide to go with a specific hardware vendor ,when my cloud grows my dependency or lock in with the vendor grows.

Opensource played a great part in bringing the Network revolution to us,OVS switch,Open day Light Controller and Openflow Protocol are some of the leading opensource projects in this area,

But right now it seems to be a two way fight between VMware NSX and Cisco ACI for Network virtualization mind space.Both are great technologies works great with their software and hardware and uses overlay protocols like VXLAN and GRE.

Sreejith Keeriyattil