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Nicira is accelerating the transformation to cloud infrastructure by delivering software that virtualizes the network. The company was founded by networking research leaders from Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley, and is led by proven entrepreneurs in networking, virtualization and security.

The Problem

Data center networks today are inflexible, inefficient, complex and costly. VLANs are an example of the problem - complex, limited in scale, hardware specific, expensive to manage and expensive to upgrade. But, networks have been this way for 20 years, so why is this a problem now? Cloud. In a static data center environment, complex manual provisioning is bearable. However, cloud data centers are dynamic by design; workloads appear and move all the time. The current operational model simply doesn't work for cloud and the root cause is that service provisioning is bound to the physical network hardware and topology.

Fix the Problem - Virtualize the Network

Nicira virtualizes the network, like VMware did for servers. Learning from the wisdom and experience of VMware, Nicira has created the first and only network hypervisor, a solution that transforms data center networks and enables never before possible network agility, operational efficiency and service innovation.

The network hypervisor decouples network services from the underlying hardware, like server hypervisors separate physical servers from virtual machines. Managed by a distributed control system, the Nicira network hypervisor faithfully reproduces the entire network service model in logical space, making it possible to programmatically provision and dynamically control service-rich logical networks that rise above physical network limitations and boundaries.

Nicira enables the right operational model for networking - the physical infrastructure is transformed into a generalized resource pool of switching capacity, with all of the service intelligence performed in software at the edge of the network - the physical network does one thing and one thing only, it simply forwards IP packets.

Nicira is a software solution that works on your existing physical network, requires no hardware upgrades, and for the first time meets the operational requirements of large-scale cloud data centers.

Resources:

• For more information on Nicira white papers and data sheets, please contact Liz Losi at liz.losi@carahsoft.com.