Competition is heating up in the network virtualization space

Network administrators may take an easy breath. After building various components for the virtual world and thereafter helping to increase their speed and capacity, the giants in network world, seem to be focusing on easing the life of network administrators. This news will come as a relief for the 'always on toes' guys running all over the place solving all sorts of network problems faced by their users.

The apparent solution seems to the concept called as 'network virtualization', which means nothing but to divide the available bandwidth into independent channels, isolated from each other. Later these channels can be dynamically assigned to servers or devices in the real time. A network subscriber with the right authentication and privileges can access the network from his system. This helps the network administrators to virtually manage the storage media as they can be dynamically assigned and share the storage space efficiently among various servers. This may not be of help to small set ups or the places where the network load is constant over a period of time and there are no regular upsurges in the usage. But if you are talking about irregular network load and incessant network traffic or various storage media coming in and out of systems at the whim of users, you need to think of virtualizing the network making it leaner and more manageable.

By definition Network virtualization (NV) is using network resources through a logical segmentation of a single physical network. Network virtualization is achieved by installing software and services to manage the sharing of storage, computing cycles and applications. Network virtualization treats all servers and services in the network as a single pool of resources that can be accessed without regard for its physical components. The term network virtualization is often used to describe many things including network management, storage virtualization, and even grid computing. (Source: Wikipedia). There are various approaches for virtualization and the virtualized network may have different sets of network components or various types of network in them. So generally the virtual network may consist of Network hardware, such as switches and network adapters, networks, such as virtual LANs (VLANs) and containers such as virtual machines (VMs) and Solaris Servers. It may also have various network storage devices and media. (Source: Wikipedia).

Considering the complexity of managing networks and the investment that is involved in setting up a complete network, it makes a great business case for the companies to look at avenues of saving costs that bring more efficiency at the same time. It seems that Juniper has taken this approach when the company outlined its new "3-2-1" data center network architecture aimed at improving latency, increasing density, boosting security, lowering power requirement and simplifying management.

As per the overall understanding of Datacenter goes, they have access, aggregation and core switching layers. Juniper currently clubs the aggregation and core layers into a single switch. The Virtual Chassis creates a single, logical switching fabric across multiple racks in the data center. By this approach Juniper aims to let the administrators move virtual machines between 10x faster than current approaches. The company is also introducing EX4500 switch designed for top-of-rack data center access, and the EX8200-40 SX line card that can be inserted into the company's EX8200 chassis to enable up to 640 ports of 10 GigE in a single box. On the software front, the company is seeking to drive simplification through a single network OS (Junos), single software release chain, and flexible software platforms (Junos, Junos Space and Junos Pulse).

But they are not the only one there. In a press release issued on 19th of May 2010, SAP announced a partnership with the Cisco-EMC-VMware Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition and it is testing application deployments on the VCE's Vblock virtualization infrastructure. The Vblock infrastructure combines computing, network, storage, security, management and virtualization technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMWare. As it is claimed, the Vblock will help customers deliver shared services through private clouds, according to SAP.

There might be many more such coalitions and product introductions taking place in the market to gain the maximum customer footprint. So for the network administrators looking for easing their hectic schedules, keep your eyes open. Your ideal solution may be just around the corner!

Ted Black
Senior Solution Architect
Global IT Networks Ltd
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