From Moscone Center in San Francisco, Stu Miniman and John Furrier kicked off VMWorld 2013 with Kelly Herrell, VP and GM, Software Networking Business Unit, Vyatta, a Brocade company. Kelly was the CEO of Vyatta prior to its acquisition by Brocade, providing software defined solutions before software-defined was a mainstream term. His current responsibilities with Brocade include building and driving the software networking strategy.

John Furrier commented that the software defined data center has become sort of a destination in the modern era, and network has been an area that’s been extremely innovative lately.

Herrell agrees: “It’s easy to follow the pattern. Just follow the app. Anytime there’s a major architectural change to IT, it starts with the application. Nobody goes and changes a network and waits for an application to fill it. Once the application model changes, the storage model has to adapt to that, and then the networking has to race to catch up.”

This is not a new pattern, it has always been like that. From mainframe to client server, this transition has happened before. “You had to change the storage model and change the network. Now, with the cloud, we have the same: we have the application model that changed, the storage that followed and the networking that is now really racing to catch up.”

Furrier stated that nowadays the apps are dictating the policies, and Herrell picked up on the subject.

“What’s happening with the apps is not restricted to apps virtualizing; they are centralizing (the cloud model), sharing resources, so this is causing the need for more and more of the functionality that you find in traditional IT architectures to start merging and blending in with the server,” Herrell said. “In networking, for example, there was the V-switch, that was the first step in. Now there’s the routing, the security, distributive models, and the big challenge in following the app is keeping up with the explosion of the virtualized app. More than 50 percent of the servers that are shipping are virtualized. And those servers are bigger and faster.”

Pressure on the network

 
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What pressure is this putting on the network? – asked Furrier.

There are a couple of things to address:

1. how you manipulate the network – this is where SDN comes into play. Separation of controllers and forwarding plans, feeding logic into the controller which gets distributed out to execute the desired behavior.

2. what’s being manipulated – it is not all hardware anymore; now you are also manipulating networking software, network virtual machines, virtual routers and virtual firewalls

All these things together are causing the innovation in networking right now.

“Networks evolve through a succession of upgrades. The Radical Revolution refers to the process of extending the networking into the server, adding new networking capabilities instead of ripping old pieces out to replace them with new pieces,” explained Herrell.

“You have to have both hardware and software, and they both need to be able to inter-operate really well. You don’t get many massive technology disruptions in your career in IT, but this is one of the biggest you’ll ever see. All rules are off. There’s this idea that everything needs to be a bigger, better, faster.”

The theme of VMware is “Defy convention.” Furrier wanted to know what was the core thing in the ecosystem for vmware: underlays, overlays and what was the outlook.

Kelly Herrell believes in “the right tool for the right job.”

“There’s going to be both, the overlay model will pick up in the cloud and hosted types of environments, and the underlay will be more specific to the private clouds, but they will converge in time.”

Asked for a piece of advice for the fellow IT professionals, Herrell replied: “Have tremendous skills and know how the networks are built and how to manage them. They have to transfer that skill into the new arena that’s happening inside the server. It’s not scary, don’t be afraid, jump into it”, advised Herrell. “The leading edge architecture are the ones that are starting from the server and working their way out, so get ahead of that curve.”