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Start-Up Nicira Plans to Disrupt Networking Giants
By QUENTIN HARDY
SAN FRANCISCO — Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon already turn millions of computers into single clouds of supermachines, managing the flow between personal computers of cat videos, e-mails and the president’s recent chat on Google Plus.
Millions more of these computer servers figure out what to sell you while you browse the Web. These global systems work only because of something called virtualization, a kind of software that tricks one server into doing the tasks of several. The cost savings and flexibility revolutionized the data management business, since virtualized machines can run on cheap semiconductors.
High-price networking gear still ties together most data centers, however. Companies pay for it because managing data traffic is tougher than mere computation. Now a small company called Nicira, along with a few other scrappy players, is pursuing what is called software-defined networking, which should cut costs and make equipment more efficient.
A software-defined network, which originated in government spy agencies, is similar to server virtualization, and because of that is quite likely bad news for networking equipment makers like Cisco and Juniper Networks. If proprietary systems can be mixed together and cheap chips used in place of custom semiconductors, prices for the gear would most likely will drop.
Nicira claims savings of up to $37 million in a facility with 40,000 servers, and 50 percent cost reductions in setting up the fastest networks. Customers from big phone companies, large Internet service providers and computer makers think they can exceed the kind of cost savings Google has achieved in its large data centers.
“Extremely powerful computing is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper,” said Lew Moorman, the president of Rackspace, a company with 161,000 customers using its cloud. It has been working with Nicira since 2009. “Facebook and Google run their applications at a massive scale; we’ll let tens of thousands of companies do whatever they want too, on the fly.”
Other Nicira customers include AT&T, which is spending $1 billion a year on its cloud. AT&T wants its software engineers to be able to quickly build new personalized features for 100 million or more mobile phone customers. By interacting with several parts of the AT&T cloud, it might be possible for customers to send automatic texts to their friends, for instance when they are stuck in traffic.
Japan’s NTT, the big phone company, has used it to automatically reconfigure a computer center’s thousands of machines, enabling it to take on the workload of a center in the middle of a tsunami. EBay can use it to better manage workloads or offer new sales applications across its network.
Martin Casado, the company’s co-founder and chief technical officer, began thinking about network virtualization in 2002, when he was working as a contractor for a United States intelligence agency. (He cannot say which one.) “They needed secure, isolated networks that shared the same infrastructure,” he said. “Virtualization means you have fewer machines and fewer cables. That is fewer points of entry they have to control.”
It is tough to do. Networks are supposed to operate in real time, and many computing jobs cannot shift around a data center without manually changing things like security and processing-task priorities. Mr. Casado, who calls network virtualization “the hardest problem I’ve looked at in my life,” returned to Stanford and in 2007 finished a Ph.D. thesis on security management in big networks. The government gave Nicira its first $1.5 million soon after.
The product took four years of work by Mr. Casado and 20 other Ph.D.’s from Google, M.I.T., Cornell and VMWare, a pioneer in server virtualization. They worked quietly, but last spring the company attracted a burglar who, according to surveillance tapes, broke into the building and walked straight to the desk of Nicira’s principal engineer. The company, which thinks the burglar was most likely an agent of a foreign government, claims the man made off with a low-value testing server.
A number of start-ups are betting big on network virtualization. Pica8 has a virtualized switch made with off-the-shelf chips that it claims can do the work of a $25,000 Cisco box for $3,000. VMWare, which already sells small-scale network virtualization, works with young switch vendors like Arista on building extremely large data centers.
“Nicira is an element we can work with,” said Paul Maritz, VMWare’s chief executive. “There will be tens of thousands of big clouds defined by software, and they’ll be easy to set up.”
Both Cisco and Juniper say that they are already in the network virtualization game, but say there is still plenty of space for their custom systems. “We have been in the forefront of driving network virtualization and programmability,” Ram Velaga, a Cisco vice president, wrote in an e-mail. “We continue to evolve those technologies.” Juniper is also pushing more software-intensive systems but, like Cisco, it uses custom chips.
The incumbents may have a while left to contend with the upstarts, because of some deeply held loyalties. Despite its long interest in Nicira, Mr. Casado says his old friends in the intelligence community are not yet customers. “They are the most conservative and slow-moving people you can find, as far as technology cycles go,” he said with a shrug.
“Companies like NTT and Rackspace are in a rush.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/start-up-nicira-plans-to-disrupt-networking-giants/?scp=1&sq=a startup has plans&st=Search
By QUENTIN HARDY
SAN FRANCISCO — Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon already turn millions of computers into single clouds of supermachines, managing the flow between personal computers of cat videos, e-mails and the president’s recent chat on Google Plus.
Millions more of these computer servers figure out what to sell you while you browse the Web. These global systems work only because of something called virtualization, a kind of software that tricks one server into doing the tasks of several. The cost savings and flexibility revolutionized the data management business, since virtualized machines can run on cheap semiconductors.
High-price networking gear still ties together most data centers, however. Companies pay for it because managing data traffic is tougher than mere computation. Now a small company called Nicira, along with a few other scrappy players, is pursuing what is called software-defined networking, which should cut costs and make equipment more efficient.
A software-defined network, which originated in government spy agencies, is similar to server virtualization, and because of that is quite likely bad news for networking equipment makers like Cisco and Juniper Networks. If proprietary systems can be mixed together and cheap chips used in place of custom semiconductors, prices for the gear would most likely will drop.
Nicira claims savings of up to $37 million in a facility with 40,000 servers, and 50 percent cost reductions in setting up the fastest networks. Customers from big phone companies, large Internet service providers and computer makers think they can exceed the kind of cost savings Google has achieved in its large data centers.
“Extremely powerful computing is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper,” said Lew Moorman, the president of Rackspace, a company with 161,000 customers using its cloud. It has been working with Nicira since 2009. “Facebook and Google run their applications at a massive scale; we’ll let tens of thousands of companies do whatever they want too, on the fly.”
Other Nicira customers include AT&T, which is spending $1 billion a year on its cloud. AT&T wants its software engineers to be able to quickly build new personalized features for 100 million or more mobile phone customers. By interacting with several parts of the AT&T cloud, it might be possible for customers to send automatic texts to their friends, for instance when they are stuck in traffic.
Japan’s NTT, the big phone company, has used it to automatically reconfigure a computer center’s thousands of machines, enabling it to take on the workload of a center in the middle of a tsunami. EBay can use it to better manage workloads or offer new sales applications across its network.
Martin Casado, the company’s co-founder and chief technical officer, began thinking about network virtualization in 2002, when he was working as a contractor for a United States intelligence agency. (He cannot say which one.) “They needed secure, isolated networks that shared the same infrastructure,” he said. “Virtualization means you have fewer machines and fewer cables. That is fewer points of entry they have to control.”
It is tough to do. Networks are supposed to operate in real time, and many computing jobs cannot shift around a data center without manually changing things like security and processing-task priorities. Mr. Casado, who calls network virtualization “the hardest problem I’ve looked at in my life,” returned to Stanford and in 2007 finished a Ph.D. thesis on security management in big networks. The government gave Nicira its first $1.5 million soon after.
The product took four years of work by Mr. Casado and 20 other Ph.D.’s from Google, M.I.T., Cornell and VMWare, a pioneer in server virtualization. They worked quietly, but last spring the company attracted a burglar who, according to surveillance tapes, broke into the building and walked straight to the desk of Nicira’s principal engineer. The company, which thinks the burglar was most likely an agent of a foreign government, claims the man made off with a low-value testing server.
A number of start-ups are betting big on network virtualization. Pica8 has a virtualized switch made with off-the-shelf chips that it claims can do the work of a $25,000 Cisco box for $3,000. VMWare, which already sells small-scale network virtualization, works with young switch vendors like Arista on building extremely large data centers.
“Nicira is an element we can work with,” said Paul Maritz, VMWare’s chief executive. “There will be tens of thousands of big clouds defined by software, and they’ll be easy to set up.”
Both Cisco and Juniper say that they are already in the network virtualization game, but say there is still plenty of space for their custom systems. “We have been in the forefront of driving network virtualization and programmability,” Ram Velaga, a Cisco vice president, wrote in an e-mail. “We continue to evolve those technologies.” Juniper is also pushing more software-intensive systems but, like Cisco, it uses custom chips.
The incumbents may have a while left to contend with the upstarts, because of some deeply held loyalties. Despite its long interest in Nicira, Mr. Casado says his old friends in the intelligence community are not yet customers. “They are the most conservative and slow-moving people you can find, as far as technology cycles go,” he said with a shrug.
“Companies like NTT and Rackspace are in a rush.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/start-up-nicira-plans-to-disrupt-networking-giants/?scp=1&sq=a startup has plans&st=Search
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