VMware Unveils the Modern Network Framework for Data Center and Cloud Networking

PALO ALTO, Calif. – :

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) has unveiled the Modern Network framework to enable businesses, and their IT and application development teams, to accelerate adapting to a new normal. To help customers realize a modern network of their own, VMware also announced further enhancements to its virtual networking products and services.

For businesses today, the ability to rapidly and cost effectively respond to change is paramount. Application developers need to quickly deploy, test, and iterate applications. The infrastructure powering applications needs to deliver the efficiency of cloud operating models. Applications need to run on everything from private clouds to public clouds to edge computing, and the user to application experience needs to be great, no matter the user’s location. Traditional hardware-centric networking models simply don’t meet the needs of today’s business realities. The Modern Network framework addresses all of these needs.

The Virtual Cloud Network embodies the Modern Network framework. More than 18,000 organizations have modernized their networks using VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network solution. These customers are embracing a cloud operating model, launching workloads with full automation, and eliminating weeks and months of wait time to update a firewall or load balancer. They are virtualizing everything from the data center to the branch to the end user. The Virtual Cloud Network gives organizations an end-to-end solution to deploy applications and make sure they are running optimally and efficiently, while enabling a great user experience.

“Our customers must efficiently manage the rapid shift to remote work, deliver applications faster and more securely, and reduce the cost and complexity of connecting and protecting the distributed enterprise,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating officer, products and cloud services, VMware. “The Modern Network framework enables our customers to do this. It turns the old way of thinking about networks as hardware appliances, switches, and routers in enterprise networks on its head and instead, takes a top-down view that puts users and applications first. This is the promise we are delivering on with the Virtual Cloud Network.”

The Modern Network Framework Explained

In the traditional model, a network is assembled from distinct devices—switches, routers, firewalls, IDS/IPS systems, load balancers, and more—that are deployed separately and typically configured manually using ticketing systems. This is a bottom-up view, requiring the application to use whatever the infrastructure has available. The Modern Network framework takes a top-down view, creating a network that understands the needs of the application and programmatically managing infrastructure to meet those needs. The Modern Network framework is described by three key pillars.

The first pillar, Modern Application Connectivity Services, enables developers to connect the microservices of a modern application more securely while reducing latency, increasing security, and maintaining application availability. This is done with self-service tools that developers can use without help from central IT.

Underneath this, the Multi-cloud Network Virtualization pillar provides a complete set of essential network services that are fully automated and defined in software. These services include all essential networking functions including security and load balancing. Virtualization and analytics span end to end, from the data center to the branch office and all the way to the end user. Automation is applied not just to the orchestration of a workload, but also day two operations.

Despite the microservice-level abstractions of the first pillar and the scale-out software network infrastructure of the second pillar, at the bottom, packets still need to travel through wires and silicon. The Physical Network Infrastructure pillar is all about providing high capacity and low latency connectivity. It’s about keeping it simple and letting the software do its job.

In the Modern Network framework, security is intrinsic to every pillar.

Taken together, the three pillars and the principles they lay out are the foundation of public cloud architectures. VMware makes them available in every cloud.

The Virtual Cloud Network is a Modern Network, and it Just Got Better

The Virtual Cloud Network, powered by the VMware NSX family of products, enables the public cloud experience for enterprise workloads running in private and multi-cloud environments. Just as in the public cloud, NSX enables automated deployment of the full workload. NSX provides infrastructure services that are defined entirely in scale-out software, delivered on general purpose servers, and built into the CI/CD pipeline so the services are automatically deployed with the application. Enterprises can now deploy full workloads with a single click without opening tickets which might take weeks of manual effort to close.

To achieve this level of cloud operation, VMware NSX delivers the industry’s only complete L2-7 virtual networking stack—switching, routing, firewall, security analytics, advanced load balancing, and container networking. VMware extends the Virtual Cloud Network to connect and protect modern application environments with VMware Tanzu Service Mesh and support for Project Antrea, an open source project that enables Kubernetes networking and security wherever Kubernetes runs. The Virtual Cloud Network runs on non-virtualized bare metal servers, VMs, containers, and across every cloud.

The Virtual Cloud Network doesn’t stop in the data center. The VMware SASE platform converges VMware SD-WAN, cloud security, and zero-trust network access with best-in-class web security to deliver flexibility, agility, and scalability for supporting a work from anywhere workforce. With VMware vRealize Network Insight and VMware Edge Network Intelligence, the Virtual Cloud Network includes advanced analytics that yield better network uptime and resiliency and faster troubleshooting. vRealize Network Insight can measure the life of a packet from the database all the way to the end user, spanning both physical and virtual infrastructure; a unique capability that makes troubleshooting easier.