VMware is extending its core virtual networking product family in an effort to help companies build infrastructure that can stand up to today’s challenges, including the shift to remote work and the need to securely move applications across the distributed enterprise.

The enhancements span VMware’s Tanzu, NSX and SD-WAN products, which fall under the company’s Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) architecture. VCN defines how customers can built and control network connectivity and security from the data center across the WAN to multi-cloud environments. The company’s core networking software, VMware NSX, underpins the VCN architecture, which also includes analytics capabilities.

As part of its new developments, VMware is integrating NSX Advanced Load Balancer with its Tanzu Service Mesh, which sets up an application connectivity and security fabric across Kubernetes clusters.

The idea is customers can easily launch an application that would include all required load-balancing capabilities without having to touch the infrastructure or worry about security because it would be built in, said Tom Gillis, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s networking and security business unit.

NSX will also offer connectivity to Project Antrea, an open-source networking and security project that ties together Kubernetes applications across on-premises vSphere, public clouds and edge resources, Gillis said.

In addition, Gillis said NSX will ultimately get a new attribute-based policy model that will let users speed application protection by automatically defining and enforcing security based on profiles or behavior instead of traditional passwords.

While the NSX load balancing support will be available in VMware’s fiscal 2022 timeframe, the attribute policy model will be a future addition.

Also in the future, VMware said it will bring the NSX Services-Defined Firewall to its Project Monterey platform.

At its virtual VMworld 2020 event in September, the company previewed a new architecture called Project Monterey that melds bare-metal servers, graphics processing units (GPU), field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), network interface cards (NIC) and security into a large-scale virtualized network of SmartNICs.

A key component of Monterey is VMware’s SmartNIC, which incorporates a general-purpose CPU, out-of-band management, and virtualized device features. As part of Monterey, VMware has enabled its ESXi hypervisor to run on its SmartNICs, which will let customers use a single management framework to manage all their compute infrastructure whether it be virtualized or bare metal.

VMware said that the NSX Services-Defined Firewall running on a Monterey SmartNIC will be able run stateful Layer 4 firewall services at line rate. These same SmartNICs will also be able to run Layer 7 stateful firewalls, as well as VMware’s curated IPS signatures. This capability will let enterprise customers attach a tuned, ultra-fast, ultra-smart software-based firewall to their most valuable workloads – such as the database apps that hold their sensitive data, Gillis said.

Project Monterey is a technology preview, and VMware did not say when it expects to deliver it.

One piece of VMware technology that is available today is a new subscription-based package of the company’s SD-WAN software. The software is directed at individual remote business users who need guaranteed network connectivity, application performance and security. VMware said the package will be available at prices lower than the cost of a mobile phone line, and with bandwidth ranging from 350Mbps to 1Gbps depending on the level of subscription.

VMware’s latest announcements fall under a new framework the company calls the Modern Network, which encompasses the company’s VCN products and services and promises to extend them as the enterprise looks to address the rapid shift to remote work and deliver secure applications faster.

The framework is really an extension of VMware’s oft-stated goal of eliminating traditional network gear such as switches, routers, firewalls and load balancers and moving to a software-based environment it says is simpler and more cost effective, experts say.

“The networking implications of the cloud era are often underappreciated, but they are profound,” IDC wrote in a recent white paper, sponsored by VMware. IDC research shows that by 2023, more than 55% of enterprises will replace outdated operational models with cloud-centric models that facilitate rather than inhibit organizational collaboration.

“All previous networks were built on the assumption that applications would be hosted in on-premises environments, resulting in network architectures and operational models that are no longer useful. This is as true in the datacenter or core—now dispersed and distributed among clouds —as it is at the edge, in branch offices and remote sites, where a growing percentage of the applications consumed actually reside in SaaS or IaaS public clouds rather than in traditional on-premises datacenters,” IDC stated.

NetApp today at its online NetApp Insights 2020 conference announced it has added a storageless computing service that extends an existing Spot Ocean serverless computing framework for containers to make storage resources available on-demand in Kubernetes environments.

Ronen Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager for cloud volumes at NetApp, said as Spot Storage by NetApp continues to evolve, IT organizations will be able to leverage a storageless computing framework across hybrid cloud computing environments without having to administer storage infrastructure.

Spot Ocean already provides real-time analysis of pod and task requirements to predict compute resource requirements. It then makes spot, reserved or on-demand instances of compute resources available based on the cost-sensitivity of the IT budget when needed. That capability is now being extended to also apply to storage infrastructure using Kubernetes clusters that enable Spot Storage NetApp to programmatically orchestrate storage resources.

NetApp today also launched NetApp Cloud Manager, which makes it possible to manage data synchronization, data backup, data tiering, file caching and compliance across storage volumes residing in public clouds and on-premises IT environments. At the same time, NetApp unfurled a fully managed, cloud-based NetApp Virtual Desktop Management Service (VDMS) intended to make it easier for organizations to enable employees to work from home.

Serverless computing frameworks have been gaining traction in the cloud because they enable developers to dynamically invoke additional infrastructure resources on-demand. NetApp is now extending that capability to storage resources accessed by microservices-based applications deployed on Kubernetes clusters to create storageless environments. Most of those clusters today are running on cloud services but it’s only a matter of time before Kubernetes clusters are more widely deployed in on-premises IT environments.

In the meantime, the number of stateful applications being deployed in Kubernetes environments inside and out of cloud platforms is just now starting to increase. However, many of the IT teams deploying these applications lack dedicated storage expertise. Spot Storage by NetApp eliminates the need to have a dedicated administrator to manage storage environments that need to dynamically scale both up and out as required.

Storage administrators used to take great pride in their ability to optimize access to shared infrastructure resources across multiple applications. However, as the amount of data now being accessed by potentially thousands of microservices grows, it’s not possible for one storage administrator to keep pace. It’s now less expensive to make storage resources available to any application based on immediate requirements without having to worry about the cost of overprovisioning storage.

Storage costs will continue to rise as the amount of data organizations increases. However, the overall IT environment will become more flexible because no one will have to wait on a storage administrator to acquire, deploy and configure additional storage arrays.

As infrastructure becomes managed as code, many of the manual tasks previously associated with managing storage increasingly are becoming automated. It may be a while before all those tasks are completely automated, but within a modern IT environment running Kubernetes, many of those manual IT tasks are already antiquated. Storage is just the latest example.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has graduated Rook, an open source storage orchestrator for Kubernetes clusters, at a time when the number of stateful applications being built and deployed using containers is starting to increase.

Rook automates deployment, bootstrapping, configuration, provisioning, scaling, upgrading and migration of storage services on Kubernetes platforms in addition to enabling disaster recovery, monitoring and resource management.

Jared Watts, a Rook maintainer and founding engineer for Upbound, a provider of an open source platform for private clouds, says each storage service made is configured using Kubernetes Operator tools. Storage platforms supported by Rook include Ceph, EdgeFS, CockroachDB, Cassandra, NFS and Yugabyte DB.

In effect, Watts says Rook builds on much of the work the storage interest group (SIG) within the Technical Oversight Committee for Kubernetes has advanced to enable Kubernetes clusters to access various types of persistent storage.

Since becoming an incubating project within the CNCF in September 2018, the core Rook repository has seen its contributors grow to 279 from 90, a 260% growth rate. According to the CNCF, 184 distinct contributors have authored more than 1,140 pull requests over the last 12 months. A security audit was performed by the CNCF Security SIG in December that resulted in 13 findings ranging in severity from High to Low. The Rook maintainers have taken steps to address these issues, says Watts.

Organizations that have deployed Rook in production environments include the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, Cloudways, Finleap Connect, Geodata and RadioSound.

Interest in deploying stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters is on the rise in part because many organizations don’t want to rely on a separate team to manage storage externally. It’s more cost-effective to enable the same IT staff that manage the Kubernetes cluster to also manage all the storage resources attached to that cluster.

Historically, most of the container applications deployed on Kubernetes were stateless to the degree they typically stored data on a legacy database. However, as more databases are deployed on Kubernetes clusters, the number of stateful applications being deployed has increased. As the number and types of stateful applications increase, there is an increasing need to automate storage management tasks across fleets of Kubernetes clusters that may have very different storage services attached.

It’s not clear to what degree traditional storage vendors will embrace Rook. In the meantime, early adopters of stateful applications are moving ahead with an open source platform that enables them to manage a wide variety of heterogeneous storage services without worrying about becoming locked into a specific storage system.

Regardless of the path forward, the days when IT organizations paid a premium to store data are coming to an end. As storage software is disaggregated from hardware, it becomes easier for IT teams to replace industry-standard drives as see fit. It may take a while for storage administrators to appreciate that fact, but like it or not storage systems, just like every other IT infrastructure platform, is being turned into code.