Start-Up Nicira Plans to Disrupt Networking Giants - NYTimes.com

[Owen Densmore]

Virtualization is the technology that lets you create a smaller "computer" within a larger one and is how the vast majority of hosting services work, and cloud systems work.  But there is a related problem, "Network Virtualization" that has not yet been reduced to practice.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/start-up-nicira-plans-to-disrupt-networking-giants/

Here's a post describing the difference between server virtualization and network virtualization:

http://networkheresy.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/networking-doesnt-need-a-vmware/

.. a very interesting read for us network-naive hackers.

Why does it matter?  Well, server virtualization is great for several purposes .. running linux in your windows box etc.  But even more important, economically, is isolating large network applications from each other so they don't have to negotiate versions of core services and basic configurations of the server they run on.  This hugely unraveled one of the largest IT problems, coordination of app resources, by giving each application its own environment.

But in cloud computing or data centers, "load balance" and communication between the applications/VMs is quite difficult.  From the second url above:

So simply, the difference between server virtualization, and network virtualization is that network virtualization is all about scale (dealing with the complexity of many interconnected entities which is generally a N² problem), and it is all about distributed state consistency. Or more concretely, it is a distributed state management problem rather than a low level exercise in dealing with the complexities of various hardware devices.

My guess is that any network professional will soon have to have more than advanced TCP/IP routing knowledge (i.e. Cisco to the max) but now virtualization of the network itself.

Doug and others: does this show up in your clusters?  

And Ambient Computing may run into this as we mesh together many different nodes.

   -- Owen