VMware Tanzu portfolio targets Kubernetes

VMware unveiled a portfolio of products and services for building, running and managing software on Kubernetes.

VMware Tanzu includes a technology preview of Project Pacific, which is focused on transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform—unlocking its potential for the hundreds of thousands of vSphere customers. This includes:

• vSphere with Native Kubernetes - embedding Kubernetes into the control plane of vSphere will transform the platform—enabling it to converge containers and VMs onto a single platform. Project Pacific will also add a container runtime into the hypervisor. New ESXi native pods will combine the best properties of Kubernetes pods and VMs to help deliver a more secure and high-performance runtime for mission-critical workloads.
• App-focused Management - Project Pacific will enable app-level control for applying policies, quota and role-based access to developers. With Project Pacific, IT will have unified visibility into VMware vCenter Server for Kubernetes clusters, containers and existing VMs, as well as apply enterprise-grade capabilities such as High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and vMotion at the app level.
• Dev and IT Ops Collaboration - IT operators will use vSphere tools to deliver Kubernetes clusters to developers, who can then use Kubernetes APIs to access SDDC infrastructure. With Project Pacific, both developers and IT operators will gain a consistent view via Kubernetes constructs in vSphere.
• Enterprises that want to start down the path of Kubernetes on vSphere today can adopt VMware PKS now. VMware PKS is the company’s flagship Kubernetes offering, used by many of the largest and most complex enterprises worldwide, helping them to deploy, run and manage Kubernetes for production across multiple clouds.

VMware Tanzu will offer a "Mission Control" single point of control to manage all their conformant Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are running—vSphere, public clouds, managed services, packaged distributions and do-it-yourself (DIY) Kubernetes. The new service will offer broad capabilities powered by VMware’s extended product portfolio.  VMware Tanzu Mission Control will make it simple for operators to apply policies for access, quotas, back-up, security and more to individual clusters or to groups of clusters that span environments.

VMware Tanzu products and services also include :

• Pivotal – VMware recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pivotal. Pivotal offers a comprehensive platform and deep connection to the developer community. Every month, Spring Initializr is used by developers to start 1.5 million new projects, and Spring Boot is downloaded more than 75 million times. Pivotal Application Service (PAS) has more than 750,000 enterprise production instances running globally, and Pivotal has announced that PAS and its components, such as the Pivotal Build Service and Pivotal Function Service, are being developed to run on Kubernetes.
• Bitnami – Bitnami provides the largest catalog of pre-built, scanned, tested, and continuously maintained application content for Kubernetes clusters to an audience of 2.5 million developers. VMware today introduced Project Galleon—a beta offering that will enable enterprise IT to deliver customized, up-to-date application stacks and formats to their end developers, that are multi-cloud ready.
• ISV Ecosystem – VMware continues to expand its broad ISV ecosystem to offer value-add services through Kubernetes and build applications on Kubernetes that can be made available via the Bitnami Community Catalog. VMware has also significantly grown the number of partners that have completed the VMware PKS Solution Competency.

“Organizations are seeking a partner to meet them where they are today and guide them as they move to modern applications,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “We’re positioned to help customers succeed along each step of their journey—building their applications with the addition of Pivotal’s developer platform, tools and services; running their applications with the groundbreaking Project Pacific which will transform vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform; and managing their growing Kubernetes footprint across environments from a single control point with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.”

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Mellanox's latest SmartNICs deliver 200G I/O and Security

Mellanox introduced its latest generation ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 Secure Cloud SmartNICs for data center servers and storage systems.

The ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNICs provide up to two ports of 25, 50 or 100Gbps, or a single port of 200Gbps, Ethernet connectivity powered by 50Gbps PAM4 SerDes technology and PCIe 4.0 host connectivity.

Significantly, the new SmartNICs' hardware offload engines include IPsec and inline TLS data-in-motion cryptography, advanced network virtualization, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) storage accelerations. ConnectX-6 Dx provides IPsec, TLS, and AES-XTS built-in cryptographic acceleration, and Hardware Root of Trust. In addition to the above capabilities, BlueField-2 adds accelerated key management, integrated Regular Expression (RegEx) pattern detection, secure hash computation, etc.

Mellanox said its BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the advanced capabilities of ConnectX-6 Dx with an array of powerful Arm processor cores, high performance memory interfaces, and flexible processing capabilities in a single System-on-Chip (SoC), supporting both Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity up to 200Gbps. ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 also offer built-in SR-IOV, Open vSwitch (OVS), and VirtIO hardware accelerators. Mellanox is also introducing additional network virtualization offloads, enhanced programmability and extreme scale capabilities.

“We are excited to introduce the ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 architectures, providing groundbreaking acceleration engines for next-generation cloud data centers,” said Yael Shenhav, vice president, Ethernet NIC and SoC at Mellanox. “Built on the success of our award-winning ConnectX and BlueField product families, ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 set new records in high-performance networking, allowing our customers and partners to build highly secure and efficient compute and storage infrastructures to increase productivity and reduce total cost of ownership.”

“Baidu is an AI cloud giant tasked with delivering results at the speed of thought,” said Liu Ning, director of system department, Baidu. “Therefore, we have partnered with Mellanox, the leader in high-performance networking, whose high-speed connectivity solutions today supports Baidu’s machine learning platforms. We look forward to this new release of Mellanox’s programmable cloud SmartNICs and IPUs to deliver best-in-class network performance for accelerating scalable AI-driven applications.”

“IBM’s enterprise server solutions are designed to deliver the best performance for the most demanding workloads, while providing cutting-edge security and reliability,” said Monica Aggarwal, vice president of Cognitive Systems Development. “We look forward to integrating the new Mellanox SmartNIC family into our product portfolio for building highly efficient secured cloud data centers.”

https://www.mellanox.com/products/bluefield2-overview/

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Video - Mellanox's Michael Kagan on SmartNICs

Michael Kagan, CTO and co-founder of Mellanox Technologies, talks about the next step for SmartNICs and the company's newly released ConnectX-6 Dx product driven by its own silicon.

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Apstra builds automation between physical network and SDN overlays

The latest release (3.1) of the Apstra Operating System (AOS) is introducing tighter design, build, and operational interoperability between the underlying physical network and software-defined overlay networks, including VMware NSX network virtualization.

Specifically, AOS 3.1 enables customers to confirm that any underlay network they design, deploy and operate meets several criteria to reliably support NSX including VLAN configurations, MTU settings, and LAG configurations. These validations occur both during the initial setup of the network along with continuous validation during ongoing operations.

Apstra said its operating system bridges the gap with the underlay and increases the simplicity of deploying network infrastructure with NSX. Key benefits include:

• Enterprises can bridge the network and security policy gaps between the physical underlay and virtual overlay to accelerate the delivery of business services.
• Enterprises can automate a consistent network and security policies across any vendor, any workload and any cloud.
• Enterprises can quickly troubleshoot and remediate problems.
• Multidomain Unified Group-Based Policy Enhancements -  This provides flexibility in policy enforcement and increases application availability. Full visualization of rules provides an enhanced view of the entire security posture.

“Customers that want to accelerate digital transformation require a software-defined network that spans all infrastructure and ties all these pieces together with one-click deployment,” said Nikhil Kelshikar, vice president of product management, networking and security at VMware. “Network virtualization offers the only practical way to provide this automated experience. NSX with Apstra AOS enables customers to treat the network infrastructure as code. This helps to accelerate deployments by bridging the gap with the physical underlay, reducing operational costs and simplifying troubleshooting.”

https://www.apstra.com/press/apstra-delivers-advanced-interoperability-with-vmware-nsx/

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Video - SD-WAN Security: 3 Things Customers Look For - Fortinet

MEF Annual Meeting – July/August 2019, Joan Ross, Field CISO, Fortinet, highlights 3 key things customers are looking for with SD-WAN security and shares her view on the importance of MEF standardization work on the subject.

“MEF’s work is so important right now to SD-WAN and specifically to SD-WAN security….We look at the customers who are using SD-WAN….and how MEF can help drive standards so that across SD-WAN solutions – whether at the customer level or the service provider level – the integration is seamless and security means the same thing across, end to end."

MEF’s Application Security for SD-WAN project – jointly led by Fortinet – is focused on defining policy criteria and actions to protect applications (application flows) over an SD-WAN service. Work includes defining threats, security functions, and security policy terminology and attributes, and then describing what actions a security policy should take in response to certain threats.

Download the SD-WAN Standard
In July 2019, MEF published the industry’s first global standard defining an SD-WAN service and its service attributes to help accelerate SD-WAN market growth and facilitate creation of powerful new hybrid networking solutions that are optimized for digital transformation. MEF’s SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services (MEF 70) standard describes requirements for an application-aware, over-the-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver them. Download here: https://www.mef.net/resources/technic...

To explore the latest on industry innovations and engage with industry-leading service and technology experts, attend MEF19 (http://www.MEF19.com), held 18-22 November 2019 in Los Angeles, California.

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Video: SD-WAN, Intelligent Underlay Networks & the Edge - Dan Pitt, MEF

MEF Annual Meeting – July/August 2019, Dan Pitt, SVP, MEF, outlines MEF’s strategy for SD-WAN and how it relates to MEF's work on intelligent underlay connectivity services, LSO APIs for service automation, and the intelligent edge.

“This is the year of SD-WAN, and MEF is making a big play in SD-WAN."

All the things that MEF does are coming together with SD-WAN.  MEF has a series of intelligent underlays – Carrier Ethernet, Layer 1 Optical, and IP – that are now feeding lucrative overlay, upper layer services like SD-WAN. At the same time, MEF is working on intent-based networking that will translate SD-WAN performance and security objectives into granular technical policies at the network level. In addition, MEF work in progress on LSO APIs will enable service providers to orchestrate SD-WAN services over various technologies and equipment from different SD-WAN vendors.

“And here’s what’s really interesting – SD-WAN is going to be the catalyst for the most exciting thing to hit networking in a long time. And that is the edge. The edge is where the money is to be made. It is going to be where AI and ML are effected. And it’s going to be a huge opportunity for the enterprises, the carriers, and the cloud providers. We are putting into place all of the artifacts that make it possible for those to interact, develop new business, and take advantage of new technologies all at once. So, it’s really all coming together around SD-WAN. And MEF has all of the pieces to make a really meaningful approach.”

Download the SD-WAN Standard
MEF’s SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services (MEF 70) standard describes requirements for an application-aware, over-the-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver them. Download here: https://www.mef.net/resources/technic...

To explore the latest on SD-WAN innovation and to engage with industry-leading service and technology experts such as Dan Pitt, attend MEF19 (http://www.MEF19.com), held 18-22 November 2019 in Los Angeles, California.

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AT&T’s John Donovan steps down

John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, will retire effective October 1. Donovan joined AT&T in 2008 as Chief Technology Officer, overseeing the company’s global technology direction and innovation road map. He was then promoted to AT&T’s Chief Strategy Officer and Group President—AT&T Technology and Operations, before being named CEO of AT&T Communications in July 2017.


“It’s been my honor to lead AT&T Communications during a period of unprecedented innovation and investment in new technology that is revolutionizing how people connect with their worlds,” said John Donovan. “All that we’ve accomplished is a credit to the talented women and men of AT&T, and their passion for serving our customers. I’m looking forward to the future – spending more time with my family and watching with pride as the AT&T team continues to set the pace for the industry.”

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Equinix and VMware expand partnership

Equinix and VMware, which have been working together since 2013 to enable hybrid cloud infrastructures, announced an expanded partnership wherein VMware will support Equinix as a global colocation provider for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. The aim is to help customers simplify complex hybrid multicloud deployments, and accelerate their digital transformation in public cloud and edge deployments.

In August 2018, Equinix teamed with VMware to offer private connectivity to VMware Cloud on AWS via AWS Direct Connect at Equinix IBX data centers globally. ECX Fabric is an on-demand, SDN-enabled interconnection service enabling any business to connect between its own distributed infrastructure and any other company's distributed infrastructure, including the world's largest cloud providers, on Platform Equinix.

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