VMworld 2018 Shows VMware Focus on SDN

Announcements at this week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas can be seen as a microcosm snapshot of the general industry trend away from hardware-centric solutions to the software-defined, a sweet spot for VMware's virtualization offerings. The show serves to sharpen VMware's focus on the extension of software-defined networking (SDN) to cover local-area networks (SD-LAN) and even datacenter infrastructure (SDDC). Nowhere is that focus more apparent than in the company's NSX offering, officially characterized as the company's network virtualization and security platform. "VMware NSX Data Center is the network virtualization platform for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), delivering networking and security entirely in software, abstracted from the underlying physical infrastructure." During Monday's keynote address, NSX was interwoven throughout a series of announcements by CEO Pat Gelsinger, who at one point said, "we have over 7,500 customers running on NSX, and maybe the stat that I'm most proud of is 82 percent of the Fortune 100 has now adopted NSX. You have made NSX the standard for software-defined networking. At the conference, the company highlighted the new VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.3 edition, which it said extends advanced multi-cloud networking and security capabilities to the AWS and Microsoft Azure clouds along with on-premises environments.