VMware Inc. has closed the loop on the software-defined data center, according to the head of its software-defined data center unit.  Appearing on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the virtualization giant’s recently concluded customer conference in San Francisco, vice president John Gilmartin made the case that the introduction of the NSX network and vSAN storage virtualization solutions over the last year has positioned his firm to extend programmability across the full breadth of the enterprise stack.

“You take all of that, you fully virtualize your infrastructure, and then you bring management and automation on top of that,” he told theCube hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. “Now you have the ability to build these self-service clouds within the enterprise.” When the whole is only as good as the sum of its parts, each component to fit perfectly into the puzzle.

The pipework

NSX, the first stepping stone along VMware’s journey to expand beyond servers into the rest of the data center, leverages technology that the company obtained as part of the $1.2 billion acquisition of Nicira Inc. in 2012 to decouple transport capacity from the underlying infrastructure. That approach mirrors what the firm  has done in the compute layer with its now ubiquitous virtualization platform and delivers the same results, Gilmartin highlighted: reducing the amount of manual labor involved in provisioning resources while improving hardware utilization.

Increasingly, he added, NSX is also emerging as a means for organizations to achieve a heightened level of security that was not practical to implement in the past due to a combination of cost and complexity. The platform automatically enforces firewall policies for virtual machines so to create an environment where the internal components are just as hardened as the outer shell of defenses. That model holds a number of major advantages over the traditional way of protecting infrastructure against attacks.

“The traditional model of security is you put this big moat around the data center and you hope no one gets over that. The problem is if someone did, it’s all exposed on the inside,” Gilmartin explained. “The beauty of network virtualization is you start to bring those security controls inside the data center to the VM with enough automation that it’s operationally feasible to manage.”

The storage

The piece that completes VMware’s software-defined data center puzzle is vSAN, which launched in March with the goal of extending the programmability of NSX beyond the network to the equally crucial storage layer. The software checks many of the same boxes, doing away with much of the administrative overhead historically associated with managing the underlying infrastructure while driving down overall costs.

“Virtual SAN provides a different operating model for deploying storage to virtual machines that’s application-centric and VM-centric,” Gilmartin said. “So you can reduce the amount of time that the administrator spends on managing infrastructure and get them focusing on managing the application.”

The platform is at the heart of VMware’s recently introduced EVO:RAIL, an appliance that combines homegrown software with commodity equipment from manufacturing partners in a pre-configured package. The offering represents the company’s first entry  hyperconvergence category, which Gilmartin defined as a class of tightly-integrated that can be deployed rapidly and scaled just as fast with minimal tinkering on behalf of the customer.  “It’s the coming together of  prescriptive hardware definitions with software that’s pre-installed and heavily integrated, so it’s very easy to get to time-to-value,” he concluded.

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