Network virtualization specialist MidoKura announced its entry into the U.S. market with the launch of MidoNet, a distributed, decentralized, multi-layer software defined virtual network solution specifically designed for infrastructure as a service and virtualizes the network stack for cloud platforms such as OpenStack. MidoNet is currently available in beta to early access customers, partners and developers.
MidoNet sits on top of any IP-connected network, and pushes the network intelligence to the edge of the network, in software, using an overlay-based approach to network virtualization. The company, a member of OpenStack community, a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the open source cloud-computing platform for public and private clouds, was co-founded in January 2010 by CEO Tatsuya Kato and CTO Dan Mihai Dumitriu.
“Companies like Midokura are growing the OpenStack user base by advancing the technology and offering real deployment options. The team that built MidoNet has been active in the OpenStack community, and have been consistently contributing to the project,” OpenStack Foundation executive director Jonathan Bryce said in a statement. “The ability to extend the OpenStack platform with pluggable networking technologies allows greater innovation and choice for our users.”
The software creates an intelligent software abstraction layer between the end hosts and the physical network and is designed to optimize the network, improve fault tolerance and reduce network complexity. By decoupling network management from network hardware, Midonet helps enable improved self-service capability, and runs on commodity x86 servers, sitting on top of an existing L3 (IP) network. MidoNet provides a Quantum plugin and as well as Nova network drivers to provide virtual network functionality with OpenStack-based clouds.
MidoNet’s distributed virtual networking platform handles all of the existing networking functions currently found in OpenStack, such as floating IPs, Security Groups, Layer-2 Isolation, inter-tenant routing, as well as provider functions like border gateway protocol (BGP) routing and gateway failover. MidoKura said it plans to integrate with other cloud stacks in addition to OpenStack.
Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack is a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open-source cloud operating system. All of the code for OpenStack is available under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing anyone to run it, build on it or submit changes back to the project.
“We originally set out to build a public cloud in Japan, but quickly realized there were still networking challenges to overcome,” Dumitriu said in a statement. “Operating an efficient cloud required a whole new way of thinking around how network services should be built. Our team is uniquely qualified to disrupt IaaS networking, and two years in, MidoNet is ahead of the market.”