Straight off  his rather animated presentation on stage of the Open Networking Summit 2014 in Santa Clara, Martin Casado, Chief Architect of Networking with VMware, joined John Furrier and Stu Miniman in theCUBE, to debate the DevOps culture, the creativity, new dawn and the infancy of the ‘revolution’ in the modern data center.

Referring to his keynote, where he tried to summarize a very complex topic in a very short amount of time, Casado confessed: “It’s an exciting topic for me. Over the last year we’ve moved from theoretical discussion around software and openness to products that people are actually using. I enjoy talking about network virtualization; I couldn’t cover all but the core message was there.”

The real deal

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“What is the real deal of what happens in virtualization and SDN that has traction check?” asked Furrier.

“If you look at the SDN space, you have two drivers: one is the customer use-case driven driver, which relates to the business accomplishments one is trying to achieve and the fact the business is driving requirements in the infrastructure, pressing the vendors to build stuff that allows the customers to do their business. That is the less creative, very practical, money driven aspect,” said Casado. “At the same time, there’s a very exciting, creative chaos, generated by people trying to come up with something elegant that solves problem no one thought about. It’s the best of both worlds.”

There are three sets of players on the market, in Furrier’s opinion: the old incumbents, like Cisco, Juniper and HP, the new incumbents like VMware and some series D funded start-ups that may or may not make it, as well as the start-up community that is still innovating. “Who is going to be disrupted and who is going to disrupt? Who is at risk?” asked Furrier.

“I’ve pulled myself out of the prediction game. A lot of the movement in the SDN space over the last 10 years has been about decoupling layers to provide horizontal integration: you have more competition at every level – at the hypervizor space, at the physical hardware space, etc. As you disaggregate, you get optionality, prices drop and things become more generous. We’re going to have a food fight, but I do not know who is going to win. It will be exciting to watch,” commented Casado.

“How you build something is actually more important than what you build,” said Furrier, quoting the chief scientist of Brocade from an earlier interview. “In the old days it was the product itself. Do you agree with that statement?”

The trouble with open source

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“Open source is such a complicated topic for me. You can get in as much trouble with open source as you can with closed source. Whoever adopts it, doesn’t have the developers or the domain expertise to evolve it; you have to go through a community to solve business problems. Open source is great from a community perspective but it has its own issues. We should all make sure that we are horizontally composable,” thinks Casado. “You should be able to mix and match parts of the system.”

After Casado stated that open source should be evaluated on a case-by case basis, Miniman reminded him of the interview he gave straight after the Nicira acquisition, when he was adamant that open source was going to “completely transform networking” and change the game. “You sound like you’re pulling back,” Miniman noted. “Can you talk more about VMware’s commitment to the open source community?”

“We’ve doubled the number of developers on every open source project,” said Casado. “We started a new open source project and I believe open source is very important and a catalyst. But it’s the composability that gives us freedom. With open source I can still lock you down in a support model. We have to make sure that everybody sticks to open interfaces.”

A changing landscape

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Furrier then asked Casado to comment on “what’s changed in the landscape.”

Martin believes “the battle is no longer about networking architectures. It’s not a battle between products or start-ups; it’s a battle between three IT architectures. The entire discourse has up-leveled to IT, there are three distinct visions:

1. all of IT networking should have a hardware basis and be vertically integrated
2. IT should have a software basis and be horizontal composed
3. IT should only be consumed as a service.”

After debating the challenges of an enterprise customer, the benefits of the hybrid cloud and the need for flexibility, the discussion turned to the apps and tools.

On apps & tools

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“Apps fail all the time,” said Furrier. “The point of failure determines what is being accepted and what not. The important thing is a core, stable platform to build on. So what is being tooled right now in real-time?” he asked.

Casado shared the dynamic she sees playing out within the data center: “The primary model of SDN today is taking intelligence that you normally put in the network and rewriting applications to consume it. This is not the traditional model of SDN where you have your central controller changing the control modules. But the only way you can realize that architecture is by owning the applications. If you can’t rewrite your applications how do you get these benefits? Do you buy these applications from somebody else ‘as a service’? Do you go to a company like VMware which provides a translation layer which allows you to write your own applications on existing hardware?”

From an organizational perspective, VMware touches everything. All the discussions about compatibility and integration have moved on to do a lot of security work. “A lot of the work I do using network as a basis is looking at the problem of security. It’s an attempt to revolutionize the security space,” stated Casado.

“You said that 40 percent of the customers that are buying networking virtualization are doing it because of security” said Miniman, citing Casado’s keynote, and Furrier invited him to elaborate on the ‘Goldilocks zone’.

Martin said that VMware aims to position the hypervisor at the ‘just right’ place to do security. Speaking about the security industry, he detailed: “security spend outpaces IT spend as a trend, and the only thing outpacing security spend is security losses. It’s an architectural issue.

“Today, when we push security control out there we either get rich context or isolation, but never both. If we put security controls in the application we get all the context we need: who’s logged on, what data is being accessed. If you put security controls in the infrastructure you can isolate it, but you have no context. The ‘Goldilocks zone’ is a very unique position: close enough to the application to have context, but far enough away to be isolated. You get the best of both worlds,” explained Casado.