VMware Buys Nicira for $1.26B

http://bhorowitz.com/2012/07/23/vmware-buys-nicira-for-1-26b/

by daegloe • 14 years ago

175 53 14 years ago

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Nicely done, nicely done. Got to love it when someone takes a real problem and nails the solution. When I first read about these guys (as an operations person myself) I thought, "Ya know, if they can make this work they will have a helluva solution."

Splines• 14 years ago

I'm not very savvy on what goes on with large scale networks and whatever market Nicira is in, but this blog post tells me extremely little beyond giving everybody high-fives.

What problem is Nicira solving, exactly? (It's certainly possible that the problem-space is too advanced to really tell it in layman's terms, but I can't even tell if that's the case here).

disbelief• 14 years ago

> this blog post tells me extremely little beyond giving everybody high-fives.

It also crashed my browser with that mp3 embed, FWIW.

DASD4• 14 years ago

They are working on Software Defined Networking (SDN) or a rather crude definition is the removal of "proprietary" from networking equipment and putting the control into a more unified and programmable exposure. In other words, Cisco should be concerned even more about SDN than the marketshare they've lost to Juniper.

biot• 14 years ago

Why would you expect a blog entry from someone who invested in the company and wants to celebrate its success to explain the technical details of what it does? That's like showing up at a party when the first human walks on Mars and walking away disappointed because everyone's drinking champagne rather than giving a technical presentation on the landing mechanism.

If you want the technical details, try Nicira's website. They have a 3 minute Nicira intro video: http://bcove.me/lydym25p (skip to 1:10 for the meat). Or, just imagine if you had VMs in multiple racks within potentially multiple data centers and, on the fly, you could use an API to provision a private 10.0.0.0 subnet so that the machines could talk to each other as if they were directly connected to the same physical network switch. In a nutshell, virtualized TCP/IP tunneled over TCP/IP.

surrealize• 14 years ago

This post links to an earlier one that goes into more detail:

http://bhorowitz.com/2012/02/06/the-future-of-networking/

sturadnidge3• 14 years ago

It's certainly not advanced - in a nutshell, they are moving the networking stack away from proprietary hardware and towards x86, although that of course does not preclude proprietary features from popping up in other places. This (http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/6/4/openflowsdn-is-not-...) is probably the best "layperson" (and I use that term _very_ loosely in this forum) explanation of the problem space.

raheemm2• 14 years ago

If you want to have security at the network layer so that only certain users have access to the finance server, or if you want to ensure that your web server always has higher priority than your email server in getting out to the internet, or if you want to make sure that your password server at Yahoo can only send and receive encrypted traffic; these are the kinds of things that are made easier, cheaper and more manageable via SDN and by extension Nicira. All of these things are quite difficult to accomplish in large networks.

wmf7• 14 years ago

Nicira lets you have more than 4096 VLANs.

pmarca• 14 years ago

Maybe this will help:

http://bhorowitz.com/2012/02/06/the-future-of-networking/

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

The problem is provisioning and managing networks in a large scale data center deployment. And while networks are reasonably simple in the small (Hey plug in the cable and the light goes green, done!) in a larger (> 800 or so up to thousands and thousands) network lots of little things need to be dealt with.

When Google first started building their own switches I thought it was the stupidest idea ever. But when you look at it objectively, having the connectivity is essential and putting the 'smarts' in a place where it can be easily updated/modified/copied etc it vital. The network is just wire and switch companies put a lot of 'value add' in their switches which basically puts their second tier network programmers writing code you can't code review but can kill your network at any time. At Blekko the few outages we've had were all caused by a switch software programmer. How scary is that?

So if your wondering, what this means for the rest of us, it means there is a market for a rock-solid-dumb-as-a-post set of switches that do absolutely nothing to the traffic except forward it. They restart in milliseconds, not seconds. They achieve lowest cost per port because they have very little firmware, and the firmware they do have can, for all practical purposes, be proven correct. The money is spent on really reliable transceivers and low noise cross connects and just enough SNMP work to give the upper levels of the system a clue as to whether they are overloaded or not. They might do link aggregation. We'll see if they appear or not.

simplekoala• 14 years ago

Vinod Khosla talks about entrepreneurs having a deep understanding of an area instead of surface knowledge to make a difference. I guess, Nicira is one such example where deep technical know-how of founders helped them disrupt the networking industry with ground-breaking innovation.

Congrats on many levels! Nicara=1.3 times Instagram but several magnitudes greater than Instagram, when it came to solving hard-technical problems. I know, it is a dubious comparison but I am biased towards entrepenuers/founders who solve hard-technical problems. I am pretty sure, someone will argue that Instagram was pushing the boundaries of sharing, and in some fuzzy/meta way improving the human condition and experience in non-tangible ways, and in the process will end-up solving hard-technical problems (scale, data-science blah-blah). Let us just say, I disagree. Expecting to be voted down to oblivion.

jethroalias97• 14 years ago

On the other hand, infrastructure can only be as useful as the applications they support. Technologists love solving hard technical problems [1], but ultimately, isn't the main goal to improve peoples' lives? Almost all the engineers I know would prefer to work on sophisticated interesting problems than "another web-app," but there isn't much point if it is just for our own edification.

I can understand your disdain for Instagram's frivolity, but people said the same about Twitter and it ended up playing a major role in the Arab Spring, whereas almost no one outside the techworld knows or really cares who runs their infrastructure. Of course without this infrastructure it all wouldn't work.

Like you say, comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges, you can't really argue one is fundamentally more important than the other.

[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

modarts• 14 years ago

Twitter is much closer to being classified as infrastructure in my opinion.

Instagram is a pretty much a self-contained service (i'll draw no conclusions about the frivolity it enables, just wanted to draw a distinction between the two.)

fauigerzigerk• 14 years ago

As I see it, there are those who explore combinations of what's possible to find out what's needed and those who make new things possible by solving hard problems.

I agree that we need both. It's just that we seem to get a lot of the first and not enough of the second.

amirmc• 14 years ago

Improving people's lives can take many routes.

I do agree that "infrastructure can only be as useful as the applications they support" but I disagree strongly that "there isn't much point if it is just for our own edification". Advances are built on top of each other and some of them can seem obscure to the lay person. If no-one were pushing those boundaries we might not be in a position to discuss whether 'facetagram' is more impactful than 'instabook'. In that way, I'd argue that infrastructure is fundamentally more important due to it's multiplier effect (consider what EC2 has enabled).

I believe Marc Andreessan once said that Netscape wouldn't have been possible were it not for all the technology/infrastructure that went before it. He likened it to the icing/frosting on the cake. I can't seem to find the exact quote now though.

winter_blue• 14 years ago

Is it really possible to be independent (not bought out) while being successful and in business when your area of operation (virtualization in this case), closely overlaps with that of another much bigger, wealthier company (VMware in this case) ?

I like the Steve Jobs quote where he says he doesn't like companies whose sole goal is to eventually get bought out by a bigger player. I personally would like to build a company, cultivate culture within that company and stay independent, even if that means more competition and less cash-in-hand in the short run.

wmf7• 14 years ago

Arguably the cloud and enterprise virtualization markets are separate and Nicira could have made money from cloud providers.

3am• 14 years ago

This should have interesting fallout with EMC and Cisco's relationship. Cisco has invested heavily in creating a Nicira competitor internally (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/cisco-announces-its...).

Also, Nicira was contributing a lot to Openstack networking, at least as of the Diablo release, in the Quantum plugin and I believe in nova-network in general. That will have repercussions for HP, Dell, Rackspace, or anyone else heavily invested in Openstack.

I had the pleasure of working on a small project in which Nicira was involved. I didn't work directly with them, but they seemed really sharp. Many congratulations to them on a great exit.

wmf7• 14 years ago

I think VMware has made it fairly clear for a while that any part of the stack they touch will belong to them if they want it to. Even storage, which must make EMCers nervous.

Several people predicted that Nicira is a feature and the VMware of networking will be VMware; those turned out to be true, although in a different way than predicted.

yskchu• 14 years ago

Why would it make EMC nervous? They own 80% of VMware :)

aurora72• 14 years ago

They say the only requirement from physical network is IP connectivity. Technically it's straightforward to build a virtual machine on top of IP.

The real matter is to see that IP virtualization is the future of networking. However, I'm suspicious on the efficiency of that kind of virtualization as it might consume more CPU energy and maybe cause some lags between networks.

wmf7• 14 years ago

Conveniently, they recently posted on that topic: http://networkheresy.com/2012/06/08/the-overhead-of-software...

joelthelion2• 14 years ago

Can someone explain what problem Ncira solves? I've been to their website, but I really don't understand what they're doing.

wamatt2• 14 years ago

Virtual networks and routing. IOW no need to have big iron routers, eg Juniper and Cisco.

Cost reduction is a major advantage, but also network flexibility and ease of setup are wins.

joelthelion2• 14 years ago

Isn't performance a problem though?

VMware Buys Nicira for $1.26B

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