Cloud provider joins elite roster of Nicira's OpenStack customers

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 9 — Nicira, the network virtualization company, today announced that Southern California-based cloud provider DreamHost will deploy its Network Virtualization Platform (NVP). DreamHost joins global leaders NTT, Rackspace and others using Nicira's software to reduce costs and accelerate service delivery in its OpenStack data center environments.

"Nicira's NVP software enables truly massive leaps in automation and efficiency," said Carl Perry, Cloud Architect at DreamHost. "NVP decouples network services from hardware, providing unique flexibility for both DreamHost and our customers. By sidestepping the old network paradigm, DreamHost can rapidly build powerful features for our cloud. Network virtualization is a critical component necessary for architecting the next-generation public cloud services. Nicira's plug-in technology, coupled with the open source Ceph and OpenStack software, is a technically sound recipe for offering our customers real infrastructure-as-a-service."

"NVP not only gives us flexibility and operational efficiency with our network infrastructure, but it also provides us with a platform for innovating novel network and security features for our customers," added Jonathan LaCour, VP of Software Development at DreamHost.

Network virtualization removes the barriers common to traditional networks. It offers multi-tenant network scalability and security, flexibility of workload placement and mobility, and elimination of error-prone manual reconfiguration, all challenges faced by large-scale cloud operators. As a result, network virtualization provides enormous capabilities for software developers to create and deploy web-scale apps or enterprises to create a research and development cloud.

"DreamHost and Nicira demonstrate that NVP is the network for OpenStack. Together, we share a game-changing vision of public cloud for developers and enterprises alike," said Alan Cohen, Vice President of Marketing at Nicira. "Combined with OpenStack Quantum, NVP delivers network-as-a-service: meaning total hardware independence, multi-tenant cloud scale, and enterprise security and networking capabilities, all on-demand."

NVP is a scalable software system implemented at the network edge and managed by distributed clustered controller architecture. The system forms a thin software layer that treats the physical network as an IP backplane. This approach allows the creation of virtual networks that have the same properties and services as physical networks, such as security and QoS policies, L2 reachability, and higher-level service capabilities such as stateful firewalling. These virtual networks can be created dynamically to support VM mobility anywhere within or between data centers without service disruption or address changes.

About DreamHost

DreamHost is a leading web hosting and cloud services provider with over 300,000 customers and 1.2 million domain names hosted worldwide. The company offers a wide spectrum of web hosting and cloud solutions including traditional Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, and Domain Name Registration. DreamHost is the principal sponsor of the Ceph open-source distributed storage system. Please visit http://www.dreamhost.com for more information.

About Nicira

Nicira is the network virtualization company. Nicira's Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) enables the dynamic creation of virtual network infrastructure and services that are completely decoupled and independent from the physical network hardware. Innovative companies such as AT&T, DreamHost, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace are using Nicira NVP to accelerate service delivery from weeks to minutes and dramatically reduce complexity and cost. For more information, visit www.nicira.com.

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Source: Nicira