With NSX, US-based VMware aims to create virtual network capabilities to harness the potential of digitisation for Digital India
If you haven’t noticed, private businesses as well as government entities seem to be in a distinct hurry to digitise their operations. The benefits are huge: by digitising information-intensive processes, products and services are delivered swiftly with a seamless user experience.
There are also lower costs and better operational controls in joining the digitisation bandwagon. Examples span multiple industries: companies like Uber, Google and Amazon have disrupted their respective markets and replaced some of the old guards in fewer than 10 years—thanks to their pure digital play.
Ever wondered how this transformation has come about? Well, this has been possible because key technologies such as mobility, cloud computing, analytics, Big Data platforms and IoT have matured and have come together to create a ‘perfect storm’.
But two critical elements of digitisation — network architecture and security — are yet to be part of this ‘perfect storm’. And, this is what US-based software company VMware aims to change with its NSX solutions by creating virtual network capabilities with the existing physical network layers.
Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, software-defined data centre division, VMware tells EC: “We all know that digitisation is the reality. Not only do the government and enterprises have to digitise, but digitisation also means that the pace at which organisation innovate has to go up dramatically. In order to do that, organisations need a different kind of infrastructure model that gives equal focus to different components including network architecture and security.”
Agreeing with the views of Raghuram, Arun Kumar Parameswaran, MD, VMware India explains that most companies who want to roll out a new application face security and load balancing problems. Similarly, for them isolating the external facing application from internal facing applications is critical. “All of these things become a huge challenge in any organisation’s journey towards digitisation. That is why firms that intend to do digital transformation requires a new kind of network architecture and that is where NSX comes in,” says Parameswaran.
VMware NSX is a network virtualisation platform in which software operate using any hypervisor and most networking hardware. It is akin to virtual server technology in which switches and other network components get represented by software leading to a virtual network replacing a physical network.
VMware introduced NSX into the market three years ago, but it took a lot of time to incubate. So far nearly 2,000 customers worldwide have adopted it. According to VMware officials, the growth has been over a 100% y-o-y. In India, telcos like Bharti, banks like SBI and IT firms such as Wipro, TCS have adopted it. There are different factors that are driving the demand for NSX, but Raghuram says that the key reason organisations are considering NSX is because of security.
VMware sees good business prospects for its offering in both the central government and the states. “Like enterprises, digital is not possible without cloud, and governments, obviously being large enough, for all sorts of good reasons want to run their own cloud.
Now, the only way to build the cloud is to use technologies like server virtualisation and network virtualisation. As a result, we have seen a lot of adoption by government on their private cloud initiatives and this forms a sort of foundation on top of which the government roll out their applications or e-business citizen facing applications,” says Raghuram.