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Midokura and Cumulus Networks plan to give customers a look in May of a joint solution designed to enable organizations to manage workloads on both virtual and physical networking infrastructures.
Network virtualization traditionally is designed to enable communications among virtual devices and machines that are housed on overlay networks that sit above the hardware layer. Through the partnership, Midokura’s MidoNet network virtualization solution will be able to connect to physical switches that are running Cumulus’ Linux technology. This will allow network traffic to travel from virtual machines to physical systems through a VxLAN Tunnel Endpoint, enabling service providers and enterprise to quickly provision virtual networks for physical workloads.
“The partnership between Midokura and Cumulus Networks represents a significant step forward in the modern networking movement,” Midokura co-founder and CEO Dan Mihai Dumitriu said in a statement. “By enabling virtual networks to span across both virtual and physical workloads, we will give customers the power of choice and the ability to experience networking without constraints.”
MidoNet is a highly distributed solution aimed at cloud environments that, like most software-defined network (SDN) solutions, is designed to make them more scalable, flexible, secure, programmable and cost effective than traditional networks. Cumulus Linux offers a multi-platform operating system for networking hardware.
The combination of the two will make it easier for organizations to run workloads on bare-metal servers and better plan their migration plans so that they don’t have to spend a lot of money and time upgrading their hardware when they implement SDN in their data centers, and protect the existing investments in their infrastructures by being able to deploy virtual networks that interoperate with physical systems, officials with the companies said.
“Virtual networks are a central part of the data center and more organizations are seeking better ways to scale virtual environments,” Reza Malekzadeh, vice president of business for Cumulus, said in a statement. The partnership with Midokura enables “joint users to do this easily and in the most cost effective manner possible by removing the barriers of rigid, proprietary hardware devices with demanding workload mobility.”
The vendors hope to have a generally-available offering by the third quarter.
The partnership announcement comes two months after Cumulus officials said they were working with Dell to offer their Linux OS on Dell’s networking gear.
