With over 20,000 visitors, 250 exhibitors, three buildings, five days, it’s safe to say my recent visit to VMworld in San Francisco (as part of the Tufin team) was nothing if not busy! A hugely successful event, the virtualization ‘buzz’ lasted from show start to show finish. In among the highlights at the show were divisions such as VMWare’s End User Computing (EUC) which generated great interest and showcased a range of virtual desktops (Horizon), mobile device management (AirWatch) and desktop virtualization software. This makes sense with the shift to mobile currently taking the IT industry by storm.
The announcement that VMware will support OpenStack in its cloud management software came as no huge surprise to most, but still peppered conversations. If you weren’t able to make the show, SDN have put together a good roundup here.
On our stand and looking round the show, the Software Defined Data Center and within it,VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform, clearly made big waves following its launch last year.
VMware is positioning NSX as a platform that enables the software defined data center (SDDC). By defining it as a platform (rather than a solution or product), they clearly believe that the success of this platform would be in its ability to create a large ecosystem of partners which can provide added-value to the end users and their transition to the SDDC.
Not only that, but VMware is also positioning NSX as a security-enabling platform to allow IT administrators to provide new unprecedented security capabilities for east-west traffic (that is traffic that is flowing within the data center, and not to or from it) in a simple and convenient way. This enables what VMware calls micro-segmentation. Micro-segmentation is a move toward an increasingly fine-grained network segmentation approach for data center networks in response to the increasing incidence of attackers moving freely within the enterprise data center perimeter.
For that reason, Tufin’s integration with VMware NSX plays an important part in VMWare’s ecosystem so appeared prominently in both presentations and sessions at the show. It offers a way to manage, (define, view, control and track,) your micro-segmentation across the entire data-center, covering both virtual entities (residing in the private cloud) as well as the physical networks.
And it provides a single console that allows you to manage and control your NSX security policies (track changes to the NSX Distributed Firewall) as well as your non-NSX security policies (on your Cisco, Junipers, Palo Alto and Check Point firewall) from a single place.
You might want to check out this article by Networkworld to read more about why Tufin Orchestration Suite was named as one of the Hot products at VMworld 2014.
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