Hewlett Packard and VMware have teamed up to deliver the industry’s first federated network solution, which is designed to provide customers with more automation and visibility in physical and virtual data virtual centres. Or so they say.
Companies are embracing mobile, cloud, BYOD, so manual network configuration is proving tricky and demanding. Virtualisation helps, as it offers a centralised control pane, but it still does not automate configuration and provisioning of physical devices. That’s where the new HP – VMware “solution” comes into play.
It will combine the HP Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller with VMware’s NSX network virtualisation platform to let customers automate their physical and virtual network infrastructure, all in one place. The companies say the new networking solution will provide a centralised view, unified automation, visibility and control of the complete data center network, improving agility, monitoring and troubleshooting. Or so they say.
It all revolves around man or possibly woman hours. A typical cloud data centre network may need 10,000 provisions per day, each requiring at least 20 network command line changes. These 200,000 command line changes would require 3,333 man or woman hours to complete, assuming one minute per command. The HP-VMware networking “solution” threatens to eliminate manual configuration of both the physical and virtual data centre networks through interoperable automated orchestration of policies. It also will create a single view of the network, both physical and virtual. Or so they say.
“Customers are adopting network virtualisation to gain the necessary agility needed to realise the promise of virtualised and cloud data centres. To be successful, IT organisations need solutions to deliver common management of services and operations across the physical and virtual domains,” said Stephen Mullaney, senior vice president and general manager, networking and security business unit, VMware. “By collaborating with HP on a federated networking solution, we will help our joint customers create a unified network operations model that will radically simplify IT in the software-defined data centre.” Or so they say.
The new HP-VMware networking thing will be available in the second half of 2014, along with HP’s new ConvergedControl software.
