How can solution providers and VARs capitalize on the network virtualization market?

Given the context of an enterprise mobile workforce with a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture, providing the application services to enterprise IT that bridges legacy physical, virtual to cloud is likely to be one of the biggest pain points that organizations face today. The notion of managed private clouds are likely the biggest opportunity for solution providers and VARs.

What is unique and special about the Midokura Enterprise MidoNet (MEM), in the broader sense of network virtualization?

Unlike other network virtualization solutions, MEM network virtualization overlay is completely in software, unencumbered by any hardware vendor. Customers are free to use MEM on any britebox or OEM switches.

MEM is the only network virtualization overlay (NVO) solution based on vendor neutral open source software. Companies are free to experiment with the open source software and when they are ready to deploy into production, they can sign up for a 30-day evaluation that comes with 24/7 support.

How is Midokura growing from network virtualization solutions? Where were your biggest revenues gains in 2014?

Since open sourcing last November, the MidoNet project has gained rapid adoption by the open source community. Midokura has customers in every region and for every customer type like enterprises, webscale companies, service providers and education institutions. The biggest revenue gains come from webscale companies where MidoNet has been proven to scale to hundreds of thousands virtual ports from a single virtual platform. MidoNet has helped webscale companies achieve true agility while reducing their reliance on VLANs for isolation.

While virtual local area networks (VLANs) are great for segregating and controlling traffic, they are not ideal for isolation. The pitfalls of VLANs lie in its inflexibility for change. VLAN segmentation is used to split IP subnets. Once configured, it is rigid and inflexible because VLANs have a spider web of interdependent IPs, ports, routers, routing tables, perimeter networks, etc.

Changing, breaking, moving or replicating any part of that web often seems impossible or requires tedious manual intervention.

Do you think network virtualization has the ability to re-shape the networking industry as a whole by 2016?

Yes, as soon as 2016, particularly in two aspects, open network virtualization solutions like MidoNet is hardware-agnostic, letting customers have their choice of brite-box or OEM switching gear with an attractive total cost of ownership (TCO). Network virtualization can provide networking for heterogeneous containers-based and VM-based environment, allowing for mix-and-match of containers and virtual machines, so that developers can choose the infrastructure of choice to develop and deploy their applications.