This week saw that Nicira comes out of stealth, finally putting a press release on the wire and launching a web site with more information around what they are doing.
Here’s a quick roundup of the press surrounding Nicira’s launch:
New York Times BITS:
Start-Up Nicira Plans to Disrupt Networking Giants
… High-price networking gear still ties together most data centers, however. Companies pay for it because managing data traffic is tougher than mere computation. Now a small company called Nicira, along with a few other scrappy players, is pursuing what is called software-defined networking, which should cut costs and make equipment more efficient.
A software-defined network, which originated in government spy agencies, is similar to server virtualization, and because of that is quite likely bad news for networking equipment makers like Cisco and Juniper Networks. If proprietary systems can be mixed together and cheap chips used in place of custom semiconductors, prices for the gear would most likely will drop.
Nicira claims savings of up to $37 million in a facility with 40,000 servers, and 50 percent cost reductions in setting up the fastest networks. Customers from big phone companies, large Internet service providers and computer makers think they can exceed the kind of cost savings Google has achieved in its large data centers….
Network World:
Nicira peels back the curtain on the future of networking – Interview with Nicira CTO Martin Casado
… Openflow and software-defined networking are being considered by many to be the architecture that will define the future of networking, and nobody is closer to the center of this technology movement than Nicira’s Marin Casado, who is considered by many to be the father of OpenFlow. Nicira has been operating in stealth mode, but this week Nicira issued its first press release, providing insight into what it is that they have been up to. One of the things I am most excited about with the press release is the announcement of some of Nicira’s customers which include industry giant’s AT&T, EBAY, Fidelity Investments,NTT and Rackspace…
GigaOM:
Meet Nicira. Yes, people will call it the VMware of networking
…Nicira, the brainchild of Martin Casado, who gained fame in networking circles after his Stanford dissertation became the basis for the OpenFlow protocol, is backed with more than $50 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Ventures and New Enterprise Associates. Diane Greene, the co-founder of VMware also contributed. Nicira’s founder, its funders and the technology space where it plays make it one of the hottest startups around….
With this much press, and a solid roster of brand-name customers, Nicira seems poised to do well in the SDN space.
