[April 16, 2012]

Nicira Leads OpenStack Quantum Into Production With Rackspace

Today at the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference in San Francisco, Nicira announced that another one of its customers, Rackspace (News - Alert), a leader in cloud, is driving a production OpenStack network environment leveraging its Network Virtualization Platform (NVP). Industry leader Rackspace is using OpenStack "Quantum (News - Alert)" and Nicira NVP to automate network services independent of data center network hardware, significantly increasing operational simplicity and reducing costs of managing their large-scale, multi-tenant clouds as the large cloud provider addresses the enterprise market.

OpenStack Networking, code named Quantum, delivers networking-as-a-service in an OpenStack environment. Quantum allows users to programmatically create and manage logically abstracted network services. Leveraging Quantum's pluggable architecture and extensible API Nicira has delivered an NVP plug-in which allows OpenStack environments to take full advantage of a Nicira distributed virtualized network infrastructure.

Bringing Private Enterprise Clouds to Market Through OpenStack

Rackspace operates one of the world's largest OpenStack clouds and is moving toward commercial availability of enterprise-class private networks in the cloud - a first-of-its-kind feat made possible by Rackspace Fanatical Support^TM, Nicira's Network Virtualization Platform and OpenStack.

"Nicira not only makes truly flexible multi-tenant clouds possible, it makes the economics incredibly compelling," said John Engates, chief technology officer at Rackspace. "Combining our award-winning Fanatical Support® with OpenStack Quantum and Nicira, we can now deploy and configure a secure private network and fully-featured cloud in seconds, a promise that is very powerful for enterprises large and small."

"Delivering network-as-a-service with NVP and Quantum is now simple and programmable," said Steve Mullaney, CEO, Nicira. "The process goes from manual to automatic, and uses network virtualization to move from costly human intervention to efficient self-service in provisioning rich network services."

Nicira initiated, leads and is the most active participant in the 'Quantum' project. Nicira's Dan Wendlandt is the Project Technical Lead (PTL) for Quantum. Attendees at the OpenStack Conference can learn more about OpenStack Quantum, Nicira, and how top tier cloud services providers and enterprises are using NVP at Nicira's OpenStack Conference booth on April 19 and 20. In addition, attendees can attend Nicira activities at the event including:

• A presentation on OpenStack Quantum for Cloud Operators on 4/19 at 3:00 p.m.
• A panel on Networking for OpenStack on 4/19 at 3:50 p.m.
• "Quantum Camp" sessions detailing how to use Quantum for advanced networking will be held at the Nicira booth on 4/19 at 10:40 a.m. and on 4/20 11:15 a.m.

Today's announcement amplifies how Nicira continues to build momentum with OpenStack users.

About Nicira

Nicira is the network virtualization company. Nicira's Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) enables the dynamic creation of virtual network infrastructure and services that are completely decoupled and independent from the physical network hardware. Innovative companies such as AT&T (News - Alert), DreamHost, eBay, Fidelity Investments, NTT and Rackspace are using Nicira NVP to accelerate service delivery from weeks to minutes and dramatically reduce complexity and cost. For more information, please visit www.nicira.com.

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