
VMware Buys Nicira for $1.26B - daegloe
http://bhorowitz.com/2012/07/23/vmware-buys-nicira-for-1-26b/
======
simplekoala
Vinod Khosla talks about entrepreneurs having a deep understanding of an area
instead of surface knowledge to make a difference. I guess, Nicira is one such
example where deep technical know-how of founders helped them disrupt the
networking industry with ground-breaking innovation.

Congrats on many levels! Nicara=1.3 times Instagram but several magnitudes
greater than Instagram, when it came to solving hard-technical problems. I
know, it is a dubious comparison but I am biased towards entrepenuers/founders
who solve hard-technical problems. I am pretty sure, someone will argue that
Instagram was pushing the boundaries of sharing, and in some fuzzy/meta way
improving the human condition and experience in non-tangible ways, and in the
process will end-up solving hard-technical problems (scale, data-science blah-
blah). Let us just say, I disagree. Expecting to be voted down to oblivion.

~~~
jethroalias97
On the other hand, infrastructure can only be as useful as the applications
they support. Technologists love solving hard technical problems [1], but
ultimately, isn't the main goal to improve peoples' lives? Almost all the
engineers I know would prefer to work on sophisticated interesting problems
than "another web-app," but there isn't much point if it is just for our own
edification.

I can understand your disdain for Instagram's frivolity, but people said the
same about Twitter and it ended up playing a major role in the Arab Spring,
whereas almost no one outside the techworld knows or really cares who runs
their infrastructure. Of course without this infrastructure it all wouldn't
work.

Like you say, comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges, you can't
really argue one is fundamentally more important than the other.

[1] <http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html>

~~~
modarts
Twitter is much closer to being classified as infrastructure in my opinion.

Instagram is a pretty much a self-contained service (i'll draw no conclusions
about the frivolity it enables, just wanted to draw a distinction between the
two.)

------
3am
This should have interesting fallout with EMC and Cisco's relationship. Cisco
has invested heavily in creating a Nicira competitor internally
([http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/cisco-announces-
its...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/cisco-announces-
its-850-million-spin-in/)).

Also, Nicira was contributing a lot to Openstack networking, at least as of
the Diablo release, in the Quantum plugin and I believe in nova-network in
general. That will have repercussions for HP, Dell, Rackspace, or anyone else
heavily invested in Openstack.

I had the pleasure of working on a small project in which Nicira was involved.
I didn't work directly with them, but they seemed really sharp. Many
congratulations to them on a great exit.

~~~
wmf
I think VMware has made it fairly clear for a while that any part of the stack
they touch will belong to them if they want it to. Even storage, which must
make EMCers nervous.

Several people predicted that Nicira is a feature and the VMware of networking
will be VMware; those turned out to be true, although in a different way than
predicted.

~~~
yskchu
Why would it make EMC nervous? They own 80% of VMware :)

~~~
chris_wot
When EMC'ers get nervous, they get mean. I'd be more worried about them
meddling in VMware's affairs. They've done this before when they shoved a
whole bunch of software products onto VMware that they didn't want.

Watch and see what happens. This "revolution" might fizzle pretty quickly if
EMC gets involved.

------
ChuckMcM
Nicely done, nicely done. Got to love it when someone takes a real problem and
nails the solution. When I first read about these guys (as an operations
person myself) I thought, "Ya know, if they can make this work they will have
a helluva solution."

~~~
Splines
I'm not very savvy on what goes on with large scale networks and whatever
market Nicira is in, but this blog post tells me extremely little beyond
giving everybody high-fives.

What problem is Nicira solving, exactly? (It's certainly possible that the
problem-space is too advanced to really tell it in layman's terms, but I can't
even tell if that's the case here).

~~~
biot
Why would you expect a blog entry from someone who invested in the company and
wants to celebrate its success to explain the technical details of what it
does? That's like showing up at a party when the first human walks on Mars and
walking away disappointed because everyone's drinking champagne rather than
giving a technical presentation on the landing mechanism.

If you want the technical details, try Nicira's website. They have a 3 minute
Nicira intro video: <http://bcove.me/lydym25p> (skip to 1:10 for the meat).
Or, just imagine if you had VMs in multiple racks within potentially multiple
data centers and, on the fly, you could use an API to provision a private
10.0.0.0 subnet so that the machines could talk to each other as if they were
directly connected to the same physical network switch. In a nutshell,
virtualized TCP/IP tunneled over TCP/IP.

~~~
haberman
It's not clear to me that your example actually motivates a new technology. If
these VMs all have IP addresses, then they can all talk to each other already
-- no special subnet is needed. And unless this virtual subnet is performing
VPN-style encryption, this virtual subnet does not provide any additional
security or data isolation on top of what TCP/IP already provide (ie. you can
only read data addressed to you unless you control the physical hardware and
put it in promiscuous mode).

I'm not contradicting the idea that this technology is useful (obviously
VMWare's acquisition speaks for itself), but I would like to see a motivating
example that _can't_ be accommodated with plain TCP/IP.

~~~
taligent
It looks remarkably similar to VCider which I personally use and love.

And it DOES provide additional security because it reduces the number of open
ports that you have to firewall between servers. Mistakes do happen when you
are managing large number of servers.

------
joelthelion
Can someone explain what problem Ncira solves? I've been to their website, but
I really don't understand what they're doing.

~~~
wamatt
Virtual networks and routing. IOW no need to have big iron routers, eg Juniper
and Cisco.

Cost reduction is a major advantage, but also network flexibility and ease of
setup are wins.

~~~
joelthelion
Isn't performance a problem though?

~~~
wamatt
Aparently not. Read some technical explanation on it, but can't remember the
details.

------
winter_blue
Is it really possible to be independent (not bought out) while being
successful and in business when your area of operation (virtualization in this
case), closely overlaps with that of another much bigger, wealthier company
(VMware in this case) ?

I like the Steve Jobs quote where he says he doesn't like companies whose sole
goal is to eventually get bought out by a bigger player. I personally would
like to build a company, cultivate culture within that company and stay
independent, even if that means more competition and less cash-in-hand in the
short run.

~~~
wmf
Arguably the cloud and enterprise virtualization markets are separate and
Nicira could have made money from cloud providers.

------
aurora72
They say the only requirement from physical network is IP connectivity.
Technically it's straightforward to build a virtual machine on top of IP.

The real matter is to see that IP virtualization is the future of networking.
However, I'm suspicious on the efficiency of that kind of virtualization as it
might consume more CPU energy and maybe cause some lags between networks.

~~~
wmf
Conveniently, they recently posted on that topic:
[http://networkheresy.com/2012/06/08/the-overhead-of-
software...](http://networkheresy.com/2012/06/08/the-overhead-of-software-
tunneling/)

