Comments on: VMware to buy Nicira for $1.26B in a strategic leap of faith

By: Shawn Lower

Shawn Lower — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 01:33:16 +0000

For posterity’s sake, the purchase price stated disagrees with the information in the linked Yahoo article.

By: Mark Sandstrom

Mark Sandstrom — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:16:32 +0000

How about high performance network applications/contracts?

Can these ‘soft’ networks deliver hard QoS guarantees, incl. strict adherence (at ~microsecond intervals) to minimum available bandwidth and maximum latency, jitter, packet/data-loss rates?

While operational benefits of abstraction (manageability, flexibility) are well known, the performance guarantees still need to be met for many high revenue services — and these performance requirements keep getting more challenging for many realtime oriented applications.

How do the abstraction layers (on top of commodity hardware) impact the performance?

By: Q3 technologies

Q3 technologies — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:51:42 +0000

I guess its becoming a trend to buy companies for a billion dollars !

By: kafantaris

kafantaris — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 08:23:12 +0000

With everybody else falling asleep at the network switch, VMware and Nicira have cornered the virtual server market and thus became indispensable to cloud-based services.
But up to now these two had at least each other to compete with. This has assured both strong development in virtual controllers and servers as well as fair pricing.
Now, however, the two are about to become one. With everybody else lagging far behind, they will be able to not only monopolize the virtual server market, but also annihilate the old hardware-based switches from Cisco and company.
“So what,” you say. “Survival of the fittest.”
Not so fast.
With the Cisco hardware obsolescence will come a dependency on virtual controllers and servers. This is not bad in itself since they streamline the setting up and maintenance of networks.
But it can be bad if the virtual controllers and servers take hold to the exclusion of everything else.
Aside from the inherent monopoly in this, we will also have a dependency on a networking platform — which though efficient, economical, and ingenious — has nonetheless not been around long enough to warrant a complete reliance on it.
A go-slow approach, therefore, might be in order and the Justice Department perhaps ought to look at all the ramifications before it gives its blessing to VMware to buy Nicira.
Besides, the two companies have already worked out the necessary protocol to coexist in networks — without being the same entity.
Staying that way might be better for all of us for the time being.

By: Sean Patrick Tario

Sean Patrick Tario — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 00:07:49 +0000

Very interested in hearing from those actually using Nicira as to its ability to deliver what it claims. There’s also got to be some massive deal that’s closed or about to close for them to justify a $1.2B purchase no?

By: Brajesh Goyal

Brajesh Goyal — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:36:25 +0000

Wow – Congratulations Nicira! VMware picks another piece of the puzzle for the new software-defined data center!

By: Stacey Higginbotham

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:31:20 +0000

Gadzooks. I do that ALL the time. I hope I don’t meet Steve Mullaney in a dark alley.

By: Aakanksha Upadhyay

Aakanksha Upadhyay — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 22:03:28 +0000

This is great news! However, there is a correction above with Martin’s picture. He is the CTO of Nicira not CEO as mentioned above. :)