Soni Jiandani, Insieme Networks | VMworld 2013
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2013-08-26

John Furrier and Stu Miniman had the opportunity to talk with Soni Jiandani at the 2013 edition of VMworld in San Francisco, tackling the hot topic of the hour in the field of virtualization.

Soni Jiandani is the SVP of Insieme Networks, a special startup funded by Cisco. During the 17 months since launch, Cisco has infused over 100 million dollars in Insieme and its 260 employees. On their official page, Insieme announced that "the team is now working on emerging technologies that will ultimately lead to the network of the future in the Data Center and Cloud environments."

Soni explains further: "One of the key areas that we are focusing on is to drive the vision of the application-centric infrastructure, which embraces some of the constructs of SDN and looks beyond those, to see the needs of our customers. We have a more holistic approach, tying application, networking and security teams within a common policy framework."

Basically, Insieme Network's focus is on speed, while also leveraging the ability to bring together the ecosystem and access a wide range of customers. Asked by John Furrier about the company's biggest opportunity, Soni Jiandani responds, "the latitude to innovate."

The innovations will be carried out across all hardware and software segments. Cisco and VMware have a very good, strategic relationship both in server virtualization and desktop virtualization. Jiandani says, "Customers are demanding that we work very closely on Unified Computing System." She predicts, "If you look at the networking world, only 15%  of all servers out there are indeed virtualized. 42% of all customers are multi-vendors and over 60% of the workloads will, in one way or another, be cloud-based by 2016."

Areas where the present day SDN models fall short are physical and virtual mapping, the lack of visibility in real-time, and the loosely coupled interfaces. "We, as a networking company, have to also factor in virtual networking. Application-centric architecture has to take into account that physical and virtual need to coexist. The boundaries of a software-defined network are not just around providing the flexibility of software, but also around the scale, security and multi-tenancy attributes that come from a hardware view. It's about innovating at all levels," said Jiandani.

"In the area of network virtualization we have a strategy based on application-centric architecture. We also believe that recreating the problem (network virtualization using NSX) is not solving it but moving it from one layer to another. Simplicity is a core part of this architecture," added Jiandani.

Soni Jiandani, Insieme Networks at VMworld 2013 with John Furrier and Stu Miniman

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