OpenStack Summit: Midokura Launches MidoNet

Global network virtualization vendor Midokura took the opportunity at the OpenStack Summit to announce its official entry into the U.S. market. The company, which focused on network virtualization products for public and private clouds, kicked off its foray into the American market with the launch of MidoNet, a distributed, decentralized, multi-layer software-defined virtual networking product designed for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings.

Midokura is one of several networking vendors that have grasped this next generation of networking and is looking to take it into virtual and cloud infrastructures. MidoNet virtualizes the network stack for cloud platforms such as OpenStack, adding more automation for cost reduction on both opex and capex.

As Ben Cherian, Midokura’s chief strategy officer, told Talkin’ Cloud, service providers are desperately ramping up efforts to build clouds to stay competitive against the likes of Amazon Web Services. At the same time, enterprises are also building out their cloud infrastructures. Both want more control over what happens in IT, and they have a desire to keep consumers from going to the larger competitors.

One of the things MidoNet was designed to do was simplify cloud networking. Cherian noted clouds are both difficult to provision and scale. There are also inherent security problems and plenty of points of failure, he said. MidoNet was designed to solve these problems, but we’ll have to wait for use cases to see if it does what the company has set out to do.

“We think this is a better model for cloud computing as a whole,” Cherian said.

In the end, MidoNet was developed to help cloud services providers design a more intelligent, scale-out networking model for public and private cloud deployments.

Like others in the networking space, Midokura has set its eyes on changing the way networks work and trying to improve the processes. Considering how far networking has come in the last couple of decades, it’s exciting to think about the possibilities networking vendors are spelling out, even if there still may be a delay between technology hype and customer adoption.