New features

First off, the default installation is for a virtualized environment. As Mark Baker, Ubuntu Server product manager at sponsor company Canonical, told me, this is because users are increasingly deploying the OS on hypervisors and Canonical wants to show off the OS’s capabilities there.

“While KVM has been big on Ubuntu since 2008, it’s not the only game in town,” Baker said. “We’re seeing customers wanting to understand integration or compatibility between ESX and Ubuntu, or even Hyper-V and Ubuntu, and we’re ensuring testing on these – and of course KVM and Xen — so when we are engaged with customers or users we can say we know Ubuntu provides a robust experience on the prevalent hypervisors.”

The other major aspect of this release is its integration with the new Grizzly release of OpenStack. Canonical has been involved with OpenStack since the start, and the release cycles for the two products are aligned (Grizzly came out a few weeks ago).

Ubuntu 13.04′s Juju orchestration “charms” have been updated to deploy OpenStack for high availability – for example, when the user deploys MySQL, the charm will set up 3 nodes in a failover configuration, and a similar approach applies to the deployment of the Rabbit messaging server. Of course, those deploying in a test environment won’t be too keen on running 2 or 3 of everything, so it will still be possible to install in a “less highly available way”, as Baker put it. The Juju GUI has also seen a lot of work this cycle “to improve usability”, he added.

Meanwhile, the Ceph storage subsystem is now fully integrated with Ubuntu and OpenStack, in order to please Canonical’s telco and service provider clients, and Ubuntu’s Floodlight OpenFlow controller has also been updated. Although Canonical and VMware are working closely on Nicira, “having an open-source alternative to Nicira is also important,” Baker pointed out.

Carrier adoption

Speaking of carriers and service providers, this is the market segment where Canonical appears to be thriving.

“OpenStack certainly has been the biggest growth areas for us in the last 12 months,” Baker said. “We have got engaged with the types of customers that we could only have dreamed of, looking back a few years. OpenStack is gaining adoption with carriers, and most people doing that to scale are doing that with OpenStack on Ubuntu. Most of the major telcos, the global names that you’ll see, are deploying their OpenStack on Ubuntu.”

Baker also claimed that OpenStack is seeing traction in the big data space, with users deploying Hadoop and Cassandra on Ubuntu – he suggested this may be out of “developer affinity” with the Linux distro.

“It’s fair to say the bread and butter of our user base is running web infrastructure,” Baker said. “A lot of that user base is moving that web infrastructure into the cloud. We’ve gained significant popularity on Azure – there is a fair proportion of that running Linux. While you wouldn’t think it a natural fit to provide Ubuntu on a Microsoft cloud, we actually think it’s quite exciting.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012

Adoption of products slated for release later this year have executives feeling hopeful about seeing this year’s total revenues. They should come in 14 percent to 16 percent ahead of last year when taking into account the removal of revenues and costs related to the Pivotal Initiative, Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Chadwick said on a call with investors. Last year’s revenue came in at $4.6 billion.

Following on VMware’s $1.26 billion acquisition of network-virtualization player Nicira, VMware will ship its NSX software, drawing on elements of Nicira software, in the second half of the year. NSX will lower customers’ capital and operational expenditures and “transform network operations in a non-disruptive manner,” said President Carl Eschenbach.

Eschenbach also said the vCloud Hybrid service will launch on May 21.

Rather than expecting a negative impact from the OpenStack movement, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said he sees OpenStack as offering “an expanding addressable market for VMware.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012

The company has been providing wide area networking optimization products for telecommunications companies, optical gear and variety of other products in its 13-year history, but in conjunction with its funding it has launched a software-defined networking product designed to connect multiple data centers. In much the same vein of Google connecting its data centers using OpenFlow, or firms like NTT or Calligo connecting their data centers using Nicira’s software, BTI hopes to also help network providers make multiple data centers look and behave more like one.

BTI is offering a chassis-based product (it’s a big box) that customers put in their data centers network and connect via fiber to other BTI boxes in other data centers. BTI expects to announce customers using the product in the second quarter of 2013. The idea behind layering a software defined network between data centers is that it gives operators granular control on how they can route traffic between data centers based on customers and their service level agreements, but it can also lower costs associated with networking.

The promise BTI offers is that operators might not have to over provision to the extent they do today, because they can better manage their traffic and charge for bandwidth based on need. If packets don’t need to travel during peaks times, then the operator has the ability now to use pricing or service level agreements to move a customer’s traffic to less congested periods. To be clear, these customers are not consumers, but corporations that are buying bandwidth.

The vision here is for a telco-grade SDN offering for service providers and big content companies that own their own networks, but that don’t have the engineering talent or the interest in building their own boxes and code to do this. Despite the excitement around SDN inside the data center, using some type of software defined networking between data centers is actually gaining adherents just as quickly — if not more quickly.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of software-defined networking

Earlier this week I wrote about how NTT Communications has been rolling out SDN at multiple data centers around the world, to automate network configurations and provide other benefits. I also learned about how Peer 1 Hosting has signed up for SDN vendor Embrane’s software to round out the Peer 1 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering, and I found out that SunGard has started using those same products to lower response times for its Recover2Cloud disaster-recovery enterprise cloud. The increased agility from SDN and other innovations lets SunGard promise response times that are 30 to 40 percent shorter, and the company expects to offer better service-level agreements to its own customers as a result.

Meanwhile, SDN company Nicira, which VMware acquired last year, has identified Rackspace, AT&T and DreamHost as customers. All three of those companies provide hosting services alongside other offerings.

In 1999 or thereabouts, service providers were quick to jump onto the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) bandwagon as a way to help information travel faster on a network, said Ram Shanmugam, SunGard’s senior director of product management. Now many of those same companies are standing up as early adopters of software-defined networking.

And as that happens, it’s only natural for enterprises to witness the benefits of SDN and decide to give it a try, Shanmugam said. And thanks to SunGard’s market position, the shift could happen soon: Over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SunGard for disaster recovery, Shanmugam said. Going forward, more SunGard clients could get exposed to the perks of SDN, as the company has been discussing the inclusion of SDN as well as software-defined storage for SunGard’s enterprise cloud.

More SDN products hitting the market will also speed up adoption of the technology, which virtualizes networks and enables users to automatically provision firewalls and load balancers in a few minutes — something that took an engineer hours or days to do with a hardware appliance. The vendors are ready for the demand increase, or getting closer to that point. Networking hardware vendor Juniper Networks, soon after acquiring startup Contrail Systems, announced plans to release products later this year and next year that will allow for consolidation of hardware and connect network services on multiple devices. Cisco said in November 2012 it would buy Cariden, a company that’s come up with SDN strategy. And just last week F5 Networks, another hardware vendor, acquired LineRate Systems, which is looking to help companies take on more web traffic with more easily scalable networks, as my colleague Derrick Harris wrote.

So far, the promise of better agility has been one of the best motivators for companies to try out Embrane’s SDN products, and cost savings have taken a back seat, said Dante Malagrinò, Embrane’s CEO. This is somewhat a contrast to the adoption of server virtualization, where costs savings drove adoption among enterprise customers and the benefits of agility were only perceived later.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

A subsidiary of the NTT Group, NTT Communications announced its enterprise cloud by way of data centers in Hong Kong and Japan in June 2012. It was billed as “the world’s first cloud service to incorporate OpenFlow,” according to a news release. OpenFlow is a protocol for separating packet forwarding from routing decisions, which can be moved from a switch to a different controller. Such separation has the potential to lower the cost of equipment and create interoperable gear that would allow buyers to program their network infrastructure without resorting to proprietary and complex programming options created by the networking gear vendor.

Since last June, data centers in California, Virginia and Singapore have joined the NTT Communications lineup, and facilities in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand will come online in March, according to a news release.

The new data centers will also use software-defined networking to give NTT and its clients more agility and lower costs. Implementing network virtualization in the data centers enables more flexible and automated configuration changes to the network connecting a customer’s servers, even across multiple data centers, according to a presentation NTT Communications executive Yukio Ito gave at last year’s Open Networking Summit.

NTT isn’t completely new to SDN. Last year it was named as a customer of Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported. The company was using Nicira controllers to move data sets from data center to data center following the earthquake off the Japanese coast that triggered a tsunami and led to subsequent nuclear accidents.

While NTT is making a statement with its expansion of SDN-enabled data centers, other companies that run colocation or cloud facilities for enterprises, such as Rackspace and AT&T, could follow suit with similar offerings soon. After all, both of those companies are also Nicira customers, and hosting companies are popular targets for SDN deployments.

In any case, the rush to deploy software-defined networking in production environments will continue, especially after such a large vendor has gone public. Stacey predicted last month that 2013 would be the year big companies will see that their efforts to prevent network-hardware commoditization are doomed to fail.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user bandarji.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

VMware originally pulled intelligence & dollars from compute layer. Nicira acquisition aims to do this to networking; now Virsto for storage—
Stuart Miniman (@stu) February 11, 2013

In a blog post announcing the aquisition — terms of which were not disclosed — John Gilmartin, VMware’sVP of storage and availability, wrote:

“Our customers have told us that managing performance and data services for virtual machines can be challenging, especially in I/O-intensive environments like virtual desktops. Virsto has developed a VM-centric storage management model that accelerates I/O performance for any block-based storage system while providing efficient data services like VM snapshots and clones. These technologies have helped Virsto customers significantly improve the performance and utilization of their storage systems.”

Virsto handles I/O at the VM level

VMware will keep selling Virsto’s standalone appliance but will also loop Virsto’s data management services into upcoming VMware products, he said.

In another blog post about the deal, Wikibon analyst David Floyer said one rationale for this deal was Microsoft’s decision to include Storage Spaces storage-pooling capability in Windows Server 2012. VMware, he wrote, wants to provide “the same type of simplicity and software-led services that Storage Spaces provides to Hyper-V and Windows 2012. This is a move away from the complex APIs that have previously been provided to help integrate storage arrays with VMware.”

This acquisition is just the latest evidence of VMware’s attempt to push beyond its core server virtualization into software defined data centers where compute is just one piece of the puzzle. That push is also one reason VMware decided to spin off “non-core” technologies like Cloud Foundry, Cetas and vFabric offerings to the Pivotal Initiative late last year.

That VMware went to a third party for storage expertise is interesting since its parent company is storage leader EMC.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

He said as much on Wednesday at a Churchill Club forum entitled “Is Software-Defined Networking the Next Revolution?” at Ericsson’s office in San Jose, Calif.

It turns out Facebook wants to make networking more efficient, too. Najam Ahmad, director of network engineering at Facebook, said so while sharing the stage with Casado and others at the event. Ahmad is looking for potential solutions to problems such as getting applications to send packets onto servers’ network-interface cards and getting confirmation that that’s happened. No more lost packets that you don’t know are lost.

“We’re just starting out (with software-defined networking),” Ahmad said. “I wouldn’t say by any means that we’re using it wide-scale. We’re looking at use cases and developing that more prototype stage in that sense.”

But use cases are hard to come by, even though AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace have implemented Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported. But software-defined networking and network virtualization hasn’t exactly gone mainstream. As Casado himself put it, the conversation needs to move toward actual use cases and how to change people’s lives with network virtualization, just as server virtualization has changed people’s lives — or at least IT.

For now, the hype around SDN continues. We’d like to see some network virtualization use cases, too.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

After two years of trying to figure out what OpenFlow was and how it might change networking for the better, 2012 was when the promise of OpenFlow morphed into software-defined networking, which was later co-opted into network virtualization. Things are still heating up, but let’s look at where we’ve been.

Guido Appenzeller (left) and Kyle Forster of Big Switch

This was the concept of SDN. Under that title, the physical hardware of a network was abstracted from the virtual machines and applications running on the network. Sometimes OpenFlow might have a hand in this and sometimes it won’t.

Instead of commodifying the router, these companies added a layer of software between the networking gear and the application, generally known as the controller. Some of these were open source, some provided APIs for the accessing the underlying networking gear and some did not. The point in SDN was that once you had this virtualization, it became possible to link your network to your application. Depending on whose controller you used, this process was easier or more difficult.

Dante Malagrino, Co-Founder and CEO, Embrane; Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners; Martin Casado, Co-Founder and CTO, Niciria
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

With that framework in mind, here are the notable deals in the networking world in 2012.

Oracle buys Xsigo: This deal, which was announced in July, wasn’t really an SDN deal. Xsigo has really tried to grab ahold of the SDN banner with its marketing, but it was about the virtualization at the hardware and port layer. Xsigo’s hardware (plus fabric) make it possible to plug storage and networking cables into a Xsigo box and then allocate those physical resources without a network engineer having to get involved. Oracle buying Xsigo fits with its proprietary hardware plans and less with any sort of Oracle SDN play.

Nicira’s CTO Martin Casado

Brocade buys Vyatta: Vyatta is another company that tried to give itself an SDN facelift. In this case, Brocade, the company better known for making switching hardware took the bait (or was simply merciful), and said it would buy Vyatta while the company was making the rounds trying to raise another round of venture capital. Brocade can use Vyatta’s networking software to move up the stack and possibly provide a more modular approach to SDN that allows customers to piece together Broacde’s hardware and software if they so choose (but they won’t have to choose both as they might in a Cisco or Arista decision).

Cisco to buy Cariden for $141 million: In November, Cisco purchased a network mapping and optimization company that has recently adopted some SDN features (and marketing). For Cisco, buying Cariden made sense because it delivered the type of controlled network virtualization ecosystem that posed no danger to Cisco’s router business, but allowed Cisco to sell SDN services and applications to its service provider customers. Meanwhile, Cisco this year also announced its own controller layer and an API to let applications talk to it (but not the underlying Cisco gear.)

Juniper to buy Contrail for $176 million: Finally, last week Juniper said it is buying Contrail, a startup in the SDN space that had only launched a day or two prior to the acquisition announcement. The deal came just a few months after Contrail had received $10 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, with Juniper participating as a strategic investor. Contrail’s technology centers around rethinking where the controller would sit in a virtualized network and how those pieces work together. It had a great team and good-sounding tech, but few real customers.

The year isn’t over and it’s possible one of the myriad networking startups funded this year, such as Big Switch, Pluribus Networks, Pica8, Plexxi and/or Cyan might end up getting bought before we close the books on 2012. But even if that doesn’t happen, I’m comfortable saying this is the clearly the year SDN has sold out and networking has really broken out.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of software-defined networking

That’s a wonderful return for Contrail’s investors, which this summer put $10 million in the startup (Juniper was a strategic investor in that round). It’s also a smart move for Juniper coming just a few weeks after Cisco announced its own SDN-related purchase, a $141 million purchase of Cariden, although that was more about network virtualization for service provider customers and delivering carrier apps on top of its platform.

By comparison, Contrail is more of an enterprise software-defined networking play. The company has a few test customers and aims to make network virtualization as well as network-aware applications easier for enterprises to stomach. The company is pitching a distributed networking operating system as well as an orchestration layer that supports a variety of common protocols like XMPP and BGP. This means it will run on top of already deployed Cisco and Juniper gear.

Juniper has worked to build out software that addresses the changing traffic patterns in the data center.  With this deal it gets a team —  from Aruba and Google — that is aware of challenges faced by enterprise customers. These companies want the advantages of SDN without hiring a team of specialized network engineers and replacing all their gear. As players jockeying for space in the software defined networking sector solidify their offerings (Contrail’s was supposed to come out in 2013) it’s clear that big vendors such as Cisco, VMware and Juniper — which want to make sure the market goes their way — are getting aggressive when it comes to claiming their turf.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of software-defined networking

Steve Garrison, VP of product marketing at Pica8 said that the startup already has 85 customers in the web scale and financial services markets testing its products. Several of those customers are using its gear in production, including Chinese search giant Baidu and Yahoo Japan. Customers can select their switching hardware from a selection of vendors that currently include Quanta and Synnex (the goal is to add more commodity switch makers over time) and then license the Pica8 PicOS software.

The Pica8 software works with Open vSwitch, but is designed to work with the specific Pica8 switches provided by this select menu of vendors. Garrison envisions a buyer being able to choose gear from a drop-down menu when ordering, and then build out a custom system that will then scale using the Pica8 software. Applications and machines that support Open vSwitch will integrate directly with Pica8 software and since the boxes will all support OpenFlow, it’s possible that the overall system will be as open as a custom-built system with those goals in mind.

Since Pica8′s founders’ background is in the commodity hardware-building business, it understands the model associated with selling programmable gear that does exactly what webscale buyers want. The caveat is that buyers must rip out their old gear and replace it with new gear to use the Pica8 software. The customer then pays for the boxes and licenses the software to run them. Basically, low-cost hardware is the carrot that gets customers to buy into the software.

Another stealth mode startup targeting this market is Cumulus Networks, which was built by ex-Cisco executives. Garrison admits that it is early days for true software defined networks, but he expects the technology to have a big impact in the year ahead.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• How the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center markets
• The promise of software-defined networking