Platform for Innovation

A Platform for Innovation

Nicira’s product is a platform for innovation and differentiated services.

A RESTful Web Services API

The NVP Controller Cluster exposes a RESTful web services API that allows customers to tightly integrate the programmatic provisioning and control of virtual network, virtual ports and other virtual network services into their cloud management system (CMS). Programmatic provisioning of both applications and network reduces service delivery time from weeks to minutes.

An OpenStack Quantum Plugin

Nicira leads the development of Quantum, OpenStack’s networking component. In addition to our open source contributions, we’ve developed a Quantum plugin that allows OpenStack to take full advantage of the scale and flexibility offered by NVP. This tightly integrated solution has been implemented by several of the largest OpenStack deployments in the world.

A Network Services API

Nicira uses an extensible API to develop network services, purposely built for virtualized network environments. This interface is made available to customers and is architected to extend to partners. Applications and network services developed to the network services API take full advantage of the underlying Distributed Virtual Network Infrastructure (DVNI), which provides state distribution and management at scale.

For example: Today, firewall rules are provisioned and enforced at inline network devices. This is the model even with “virtualized” firewalls. However, firewall services purposely developed for a virtualized network environment take full advantage of the intelligent edge. Firewall rules are centrally provisioned through the CMS and controller cluster and applied at the edge. Rules are enforced at the virtual switch ingress and denied traffic is dropped before ever entering the network. Throughput concerns are a thing of the past and choke points are eliminated.  A virtualized network firewall service automatically takes advantage of underlying services inherent to the virtualized network, such as firewall rules bound to a virtual interface move dynamically with the VM, without any human intervention.