Network Virtualization E(still)=mc2

“Einstein's down on the beach staring into the sand

comes to call anyway.”

-- Counting Crows, Einstein on the Beach

 

During our launch, we asserted that network virtualization is the biggest transformation to the networking industry in a generation.  We firmly believe that cloud computing changes technology and business, and network virtualization is the missing piece to achieving the promise of the cloud…the ability to truly deliver infrastructure and applications on-demand. This new paradigm is leveraging the physics of IT infrastructure in completely new ways to increase the velocity of business.  Therein lies the transformation.

 

If you are a physicist (or at least a Scientific American kind of physicist like me), you might be following a lively recent debate about neutrinos.  Last year researchers at CERN in Switzerland started a scientific firestorm about the sub-atomic particle when they claimed to have proven that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light.   While this might not seem like a big deal to the layman, it had the interesting effect of blowing up one of the key tenets of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that mass prevents anything from moving faster than the speed of light.  There was an alternate explanation, though, one that could justify the accelerated speed of the neutrino: particles could have found a shortcut from point A to point B through another dimension. 

 

In the recent issue of MIT’s Technology Review my colleague Martin Casado, Nicira’s founder and CTO, explained why network virtualization was like The Matrix: the rules of network state and geography could be altered by creating the illusion that applications are adjacent to each other in a single data center.  When, in fact, the applications are in different parts of the data center or even in different data centers. We can do this because our Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) statefully and faithfully reproduces the services and policies of networking in the virtual space. For example, allowing geographically disparate servers, connected across Layer 3 subnets and availability zones, to appear Layer 2 adjacent. 

 

We believe one of the defining characteristics of network virtualization is the ability to faithfully reproduce the network model in virtual space, not just operate a traditionally physical network device or network service in a virtual machine.

 

As you might guess our claims unleashed a great deal of energy and debate about whether decades of IP networking could be virtualized after 4 years of work by our engineering team.

 

We like that debate.

 

It is important to back up and remember that server virtualization did not change the hardware or the underlying operating system of the server.

 

Similarly, Nicira NVP changes absolutely nothing about the physical network, which still forwards packets.  If the physical fabric is poor, the performance of the virtual network will also suffer.

 

We are virtualizing the network to create an abstraction layer, “the illusion” seen by servers and applications.  Network hardware still uses the same distributed protocols that have been fortified and served us well for decades (i.e., the Internet, it works).  The abstraction layer is the new dimension we have added.

 

What is changing?

 

 

So let me posit a new general theory of data center relativity: S=mv²

 

 

The new network physics in the data center is delivering a programmable, operational model that reduces the drag of manual configuration and the server resources stranded by lack of subnet mobility.  Network operations become more like programming virtual machines. This reduces the time, mistakes and security holes that human intervention inevitably causes.

 

Alan Cohen