Peeling the Nicira Onion

Nicira emerged from pseudo-stealth yesterday, drawing plenty of press coverage in the process. “Network virtualization” is the concise, two-word marketing message the company delivered, on its own and through the analysts and journalists who greeted its long-awaited official arrival on the networking scene.

The company’s website opened for business this week replete with a new look and an abundance of new content. Even so, the content seemed short on hard substance, and those covering the company’s launch interpreted Nicira’s message in a surprisingly varied manner, somewhat like blind men groping different parts of an elephant. (Onion in the title, now an elephant; I’m already mixing flora and fauna metaphors.)

VMware of Networking Ambiguity

Many made the point that Nicira aims to become the “VMware of networking.” Interestingly, Big Switch Networks has aspirations to wear that crown, asserting on its website that “networking needs a VMware.” The theme also has been featured in posts on Network Heresy, Nicira CTO Martin Casado’s blog. He and his colleagues have written alternately that networking both doesn’t and does need a VMware. Confused? That’s okay. Many are in the same boat . . . or onion field, as the case may be.

The point Casado and company were trying to make is that network virtualization, while seemingly overdue and necessary, is not the same as server virtualization. As stated in the first in that series of posts at Network Heresy:

“Virtualized servers are effectively self contained in that they are only very loosely coupled to one another (there are a few exceptions to this rule, but even then, the groupings with direct relationships are small). As a result, the virtualization logic doesn’t need to deal with the complexity of state sharing between many entities.

A virtualized network solution, on the other hand, has to deal with all ports on the network, most of which can be assumed to have a direct relationship (the ability to communicate via some service model). Therefore, the virtual networking logic not only has to deal with N instances of N state (assuming every port wants to talk to every other port), but it has to ensure that state is consistent (or at least safely inconsistent) along all of the elements on the path of a packet. Inconsistent state can result in packet loss (not a huge deal) or much worse, delivery of the packet to the wrong location.”

In Context of SDN Universe

That issue aside, many writers covering the Nicira launch presented information about the company and its overall value proposition consistently. Some articles were more detailed than others. One at MIT’s Technology Review provided good historical background on how Casado first got involved with the challenge of network virtualization and how Nicira was formed to deliver a solution.

Jim Duffy provided a solid piece touching on the company’s origins, its venture-capital investors, and its early adopters and the problems Nicira is solving for them. He also touched on where Nicira appears to fit within the context of the wider SDN universe, which includes established vendors such as Cisco Systems, HP, and Juniper Networks, as well as startup such as Big Switch Networks, Embrane, and Contextream.

In that respect, it’s interesting to note what Embrane co-founder and President Dante Malagrino told Duffy:

 “The introduction of another network virtualization product is further validation that the network is in dire need of increased agility and programmability to support the emergence of a more dynamic data center and the cloud.”

“Traditional networking vendors aren’t delivering this, which is why companies like Nicira and Embrane are so attractive to service providers and enterprises. Embrane’s network services platform can be implemented within the re-architected approach proposed by Nicira, or in traditional network architectures. At the same time, products that address Layer 2-3 and platforms that address Layer 4-7 are not interchangeable and it’s important for the industry to understand the differences as the network catches up to the cloud.”

What’s Nicira Selling?

All of which brings us back to what Nicira actually is delivering to market. The company’s website offers videos, white papers, and product data sheets addressing the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) and its Distributed Network Virtualization Infrastructure (DNVI), but I found the most helpful and straightforward explanations, strangely enough, on the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.

This is an instance of a FAQ page that actually does provide answers to common questions. We learn, for example, that the key components of the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) are the following:

– The Controller cluster, a distributed control system

– The Management software, an operations console

– The RESTful API that integrates into a range of Cloud Management Systems (CMS), including a Quantum plug-in for OpenStack.

Those components, which constitute the NVP software suite, are what Nicira sells, albeit in a service-oriented monthly subscription model that scales per virtual network port.

Open vSwitch, Minor Role for OpenFlow 

We then learn that the NVP communicates with the physical network indirectly, through Open vSwitch. Ivan Pepelnjak (I always worry that I’ll misspell his name, but not the Ivan part) provides further insight into how Nicira leverages Open vSwitch. As Nicira notes, the NVP Controller communicates directly with Open vSwitch (OVS), which is deployed in server hypervisors. The server hypervisor then connects to the physical network and end hosts connect to the vswitch. As a result, NVP does not talk directly to the physical network.

As for OpenFlow, its role is relatively minor. As Nicira explains: “OpenFlow is the communications protocol between the controller and OVS instances at the edge of the network. It does not directly communicate with the physical network elements and is thus not subject to scaling challenges of hardware-dependent, hop-by-hop OpenFlow solutions.”

Questions About L4-7 Network Services

Nicira sees its Network Virtualization Platform delivering value in a number of different contexts, including the provision of hardware-independent virtual networks; virtual-machine mobility across subnet boundaries (while maintaining L2 adjacency); edge-enforced, dynamic QoS and security policies (filters, tagging, policy routing, etc.) bound to virtual ports; centralized system-wide visibility & monitoring; address space isolation (L2 & L3); and Layer 4-7 services.

Now that last capability provokes some questions that cannot be answered in the FAQ.

Nicira says its NVP can integrate with third-party Layer 3-7 services, but it also says services can be created by Nicira or its customers.  Notwithstanding Embrane’s perfectly valid contention that its network-services platform can be delivered in conjunction with Nicira’s architectural model, there is a distinct possibility Nicira might have other plans.

This is something that bears watching, not only by Embrane but also by longstanding Layer 4-7 service-delivery vendors such as F5 Networks. At this point, I don’t pretend to know how far or how fast Nicira’s ambitions extend, but I would imagine they’ll be demarcated, at least partly, by the needs and requirements of its customers.

Nicira’s Early Niche

Speaking of which, Nicira has an impressive list of early adopters, including AT&T, eBay, Fidelity Investments, Rackspace, Deutsche Telekom, and Japan’s NTT. You’ll notice a commonality in the customer profiles, even if their application scenarios vary. Basically, these all are public cloud providers, of one sort or another, and they have what are called “web-scale” data centers.

While Nicira and Big Switch Networks both are purveyors of “network virtualization”  and controller platforms — and both proclaim that networking needs a VMware — they’re aiming at different markets. Big Switch is focusing on the enterprise and the private cloud, whereas Nicira is aiming for large public cloud-service providers or big enterprises that provide public-cloud services (such as Fidelity).

Nicira has taken care in selecting its market. An earlier post on Casado’s blog suggests that he and Nicira believe that OpenFl0w-based SDNs might be a solution in search of a problem already being addressed satisfactorily within many enterprises. I’m sure the team at Big Switch would argue otherwise.

At the same time, Nicira probably has conceded that it won’t be patronized by Open Networking Foundation (ONF) board members such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, each of which is likely to roll its own network-virtualization systems, controller platforms, and SDN applications. These companies not only have the resources to do so, but they also have a business imperative that drives them in that direction. This is especially true for Google, which views its data-center infrastructure as a competitive differentiator.

Telcos Viable Targets

That said, I can see at least a couple ONF board members that might find Nicira’s pitch compelling. In fact, one, Deutsche Telekom, already is on board, at least in part, and perhaps Verizon will come along later. The telcos are more likely than a Google to need assistance with SDN rollouts.

One last night on Nicira before I end this already-prolix post. In the feature article at Technology Review, Casado says it’s difficult for Nicira to impress a layperson with its technology, that “people do struggle to understand it.” That’s undoubtedly true, but Nicira needs to keep trying to refine its message, for its own sake as well as for those of prospective customers and other stakeholders.

That said, the company is stocked with impressive minds, on both the business and technology sides of the house, and I’m confident it will get there.