The network is built in

All three companies, clearly, are rushing to accommodate the new demands of highly virtualized, cloud-ready environments, and then they should. Virtualization is changing fundamental design decisions, decoupling, as it does, the compute piece from hardware and making it possible to move that around during retaining existing storage and network relationships.

This is great stuff. But like as not just as important a trend to watch is how networking functions themselves are being sucked into the virtualization vortex. One of the early cheerleaders of this movement has been Vyatta, which sells Intel x86-based network appliances, nevertheless also delivers the same functionality as virtual machines.

The former has garnered Vyatta headlines

While the former has garnered Vyatta headlines, the latter paves the way for whole new architectures, says Vyatta CEO Kelly Herrell. When you deploy virtualized, software-based network appliance or rather than hardware, "you get the malleability, the flexibility to spin up a new system, grow its resources, shrink it back or turn it off, simply by turning dials," Herrell says.

"By and large with a cloud platform you get a little bit of monitoring on the front end, nevertheless when you get deep into the cloud the VM-to-VM communication is pretty much the Wild West," Greaves says. "The Vyatta appliances allow us to embed an instance of firewall, IPS, VPN deep into the application architecture."

Private cloud

In a private cloud, this approach might give you enough controls to convince reluctant line of business folks to move to a shared computing environment.

Vyatta is only one of many companies catching this VM wave. A host of other VM network tools are emerging and promise to change the very complexion of our networks. Stay tuned.