Loads of vendors see the enterprise train chugging toward multicloud in all its mismatched glory. Naturally, they want to sell customers the panacea that fits all those clouds onto a single pane of glass.

It’s a lot harder then it sounds. In the end, their efforts may be hopelessly superficial. To compete in multicloud, they might have to haul their businesses into networking, where the biggest roadblocks to cloud interoperability stand. And they may require a whole new brand of virtual dynamite to explode them.

Arista Networks Inc. casts itself at the forefront of a new movement in networking that addresses problems specific to the cloud. “What led to the founding of Arista was we had lunch with our best friends at Google,” said Andy Bechtolsheim (pictured), founder, chief development officer and chairman of Arista. “And Larry [Page, Google LLC co-founder] himself told me that the biggest problem they had was not service, but actually the networking and scaling that to the future size of their data centers, and they were going to go and build their own network products because there was not a commercial product on the market that would meet that need.”

Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems Inc. and also had the foresight to invest early in Google and VMware Inc. At the time of the conversation with Page, he had developed a keen interest in merchant silicon for building the kind of scalable network solution Google desperately needed. His penchant for predicting tech successes served him well once again.

Arista began work on specially engineered cloud networking and shipped its first products in 2009. Now, Arista and VMware have pooled their engineering power to take a slug at the multicloud problem. No one is doing better work to make multicloud a reality than VMware with its NSX network virtualization technology, according to Bechtolsheim. 

Bechtolsheim spoke with John Furrier and Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They discussed what network virtualization brings to multicloud, how Arista and VMware’s NSX help each other, and Arista’s work to deliver warp-speed Ethernet speeds. (* Disclosure below.) 

This week, theCUBE spotlights Andy Bechtolsheim in its Guest of the Week feature.

Soft selling to the cloud crowd

Cisco Systems Inc. still leads the networking market with 55 percent total share, according to Statista.com, but new kids on the block are gaining ground with innovative, cloud-bred customers. Startups companies such as Viptela Inc. promise that “internet of things” and multicloud become much more feasible with software-defined networking.

“The majority of enterprises today are still connected using that [multiprotocol label switching virtual private network] technology, which was invented 20 years ago,” Viptela Chief Executive Officer Praveen Akkiraju told theCUBE. This is almost absurdly out of step with the cloud and multicloud operating models, which require a new, much more agile kind of network. “It’s essentially the last leg of the stool, if you will, in terms of truly moving to the cloud era,” he said.

Arista, too, believes that the future of the network is software-defined. “People think we’re selling network boxes — which is what we do. But the vast majority of our investment is actually in software and not hardware,” Bechtolsheim said. “So over 90 percent of our R&D headcount is in software, and the right way to think about it is actually we are a software company, not really a hardware company.”

Arista’s CloudVision is a single network control point that manages the entire base of Arista switches in a data center automatically. It offers a state-based view of the whole network, across private, public and hybrid clouds. “You want to update a thing, you push a button, and it happens,” Bechtolsheim said. “And there’s no more dialing into [Simple Network Management Protocol] into individual switches.”

That aligns with VMware’s vision of a virtual network layer moved higher up the stack so that it actually binds the network and the application together — which is what NSX is, basically.

“With CloudVision, we have announced a way to integrate with NSX microsegmentation such that we can learn the policies and map them back down to the access list of the physical network to further enhance that security,” Bechtolsheim said. “We don’t actually create a separate silo for yet another policy management. We truly offer it within their policy framework.”

NSX schools market on new networking rules

VMware’s initial efforts to market its own public cloud flopped. Some analysts have harped that despite refreshed efforts to gain a seat at the cloud table, it’s still lagging. Could NSX’s rare cross-cloud talents give the company the last laugh? VMware has called NSX the “crown jewel” of its unfolding multicloud strategy.

“The old model of networking doesn’t work,” Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of VMware, told theCUBE at VMworld. “It must all be done from a software level. That means conceiving a globally distributed control plan that allows you to span multiple clouds and data centers anywhere on the planet. That’s the core of our virtual cloud network strategy.”

Network management closer the application layer is the best chance we have to make intercloud operating with full visibility possible, according to Bechtolsheim. “This has been a dream for people to deliver, but it requires to actually have a reasonable amount of code in each of these places.” 

There are companies like hyperconverged infrastructure provider Nutanix Inc. chasing the single-pane-of-glass application management dream. And cloud providers might offer their own management schemes, but they aren’t likely to be vendor-neutral, according to Bechtolsheim.

“You are going to see solutions from Amazon and Azure … to bring their own sort of public load on-premise,” he said. “But that only works with their package, right?”

For the time being, it looks like VMware is holding the ace in multicloud, Bechtolsheim said. “There isn’t anything even close in terms of the … software-defined networking layer, which is what NSX implements,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of VMworld. (* Disclosure: Arista Networks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Arista nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE