Customer

Solution Battle Card

Power Person: CIO

Customer Solution Name

SDDC - Network Virtualization

Audience

Influencers: VP/Architect of IT
Infrastructure, CISO, VP of IT Operations

Business Issue(s)
SECURITY - Existing network and security solutions are rigid, complex, often vendor-specific, and operationally infeasible for managing threat propagations in the data center
AGILITY - Limited workload placement and mobility due to physical topology and manual provisioning
EFFICIENCY - Inflexible, dedicated, and time-consuming manual configuration and physical topology that prevent network architecture optimization, capacity utilization, and innovation

Customer Solution Description

VMwares vision for the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) abstracts, pools, and automates all Data Center infrastructure through the virtualization of compute, networking, and storage resources. Network
virtualization with VMware NSX delivers the operational model of a virtual machine to the Data Center network, across the existing physical network hardware.

Target Market Description

Network virtualization is critical for global and large enterprises, government agencies, and smaller organizations that are transforming their infrastructure with the SDDC. Target organizations place a priority
on time-to-market and flexibility & agility within their IT infrastructure. NSX is most frequently adopted in environments of 500 VMs or more.
Target Profile:
- Data Centers with 500+ VMs
- Dynamic data center environments that change and re-provision workloads often
- Ideal for these types of customers:
1. Innovative, multi-tenant cloud environments
2. Large enterprise private and R&D clouds
3. Government agencies
4. Multi-hypervisor cloud environments

Anxiety Question
Is IT able to deliver and modify applications and services with the flexibility and pace that the business requires?
Are workloads moving outside of ITs visibility and control due to agility or speed requirements?
Can IT adequately address increasing security requirements within the Data Center network?

Problem Probing Questions

PP1: Microsegmentation - In the event of a security breach in your
perimeter, is protection of internal applications from lateral threat
propagation an operational challenge?

Solution Probing Questions

Customer Value Probing Questions

SP1: Microsegmentation - If you could provide complete isolation

VP1: Microsegmentation - If this capability is available without any
between applications and tenants without costly hardware firewalls change or upgrade in your network and firewall platforms are you
or operational complexity, would your security posture be
interested in proving the value in your environment?
significantly improved?
What if you could apply security policies at every virtual interface in
the data center , without adding physical or virtual firewalls?

PP2: Are you concerned that change tickets in the network space are SP2: Would it improve your service availability if volume of
complex, increasing in volume and could cause major application
move/add/change in your physical network is reduced by >50% AND
outages if done in error?
reduce human error factor due to inaccurate change
implementation?

VP2: SDDC customers are benefitting from completing ten times

the number of moves, adds and changes when compared with
existing hardware-defined solutions. How would your environment
benefit from such increase in capacity and reduction in
complexity?

PP3: Are you seeing operational challenges in meeting your internal SP3: Would you consider a new IT service where complex application VP3: If new application environments can be created on demand
customers growing demands for application environments often
environments can be provisioned within seconds with no change to and at the speed of business priorities, would IT become the
with no advance notice?
existing physical hardware?
preferred service provider to lines of business and deliver a
competitive advantage.
PP4: Are you seeing demand from business to improve service levels SP4: What if you could completely replicate your production
VP4: If IT was able to offer robust add/change/expand/promote
in supporting multiple unique environments for application owners environment in software and shift applications between test/dev and environment services to application owners, would that
even after virtualization?
production within minutes, without changing IP address.
significantly reduce their time-to-market and increase overall
business agility?
PP5: Are you having to constantly budget for new network
hardware in order to be able to use added capabilities? Are you
looking for ways to extend the life of your existing hardware
infrastructure?

SP5: Would it be a desirable objective to only invest in hardware for

purposes of capacity expansion, rather than replacing partially
depreciated assets in order to get new functionality?

VP5: If you could implement the same or better L2-L7 functionality

using software-based network virtualization without investing in
new network hardware, would it improve your asset utilization and
make is easier to deliver new capability improvements over time?

PP6: Are looking for a way to scale-out firewalling capacity without

adding physical appliances?

SP6: What if you could scale-out your DMZ firewall capacity without VP6: Network virtualization platform delivers 20Gb/s scale-out
adding expensive hardware firewalls?
firewalling capacity per host. What is the impact of that saving in
overall capacity?

PP7: Are you having to over-provision capacity to account for

unforeseen (tactical) demand for compute resources?

SP7: Would it provide more operational flexibility if you could place VP7: Would your CAPEX budget be lowered if you treat your entire
any workload, anywhere within the DC and be certain that the entire physical infrastructure as a virtual pool of compute, network and
network and security configuration moves with it?
security resource?

Success Stories
eBay: Worlds largest online auction house
Challenges: Deploying multi-tier networks took eBay 30 days, limiting their ability to take applications from test/dev into production.
Benefits: Able to provision a multi-tier network within 2 minutes with completely replication of the application environment in test/dev and production environments. This reduces their time to market
drastically
Starbucks: Global coffee company and retailer
Challenges: Challenged to deliver micro-segmentation with hardware or vCNS due to performance constraints.
Benefits: Have been able to provide multi-tenant isolation within the Data Center at scale & performance. This alone provided the justification for purchasing NSX.
Westjet: Canadian airline
Challenges: Challenged to deliver network and security functionality with massively increased server-to-server east-west traffic.
Benefits: Have been able to provide rich networking and security features, keeping much of it within the hypervisor, thereby avoiding costly upgrades of the physical network.
AT&T: Worldwide service provider
Challenges: Needed to deliver competitive public-cloud services to businesses requiring ITaaS offerings.
Benefits: Have been able to automate the provisioning of complex network and security services. Vmware NSX is becoming the de-facto standard amongst AT&Ts public cloud offerings.

Competitor Positioning
The primary competitor to Vmwares SDDC strategy is the status quo, namely Hardware-Defined Data Center solutions.
In the network area the primary competitor is Cisco Systems, who are positioning their Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution.
ACI also promises to deliver the automated provisioning of Data Center networking and security services, with the significant difference that these services are delivered in Cisco hardware.
VMwares SDDC solution is clearly differentiated through the ability to completely abstract services from the underlying hardware. By implementing services in the hypervisor, we provide a high-performance
distributed solution with the operational model of a virtual machine. This enables VMs to be placed anywhere within the DC and move within or across DCs whilst maintaining all existing services.

Objection Handling
Do I have to invest in new hardware? No VMwares network virtualization runs over your existing hardware.
Do I have to throw-away my existing firewalls? No you still need these appliances for north-south traffic entering and exiting the Data Center.
Will my networking team be out of a job? Absolutely not! Your networking team can carry out the daily moves, adds & changes with much greater efficiency, enabling them to focus more on design and
planning activities. Vmware offers a number of certifications that enable your network engineers to build a future career path.
Overlay networks mean a lack of visibility We provide best-of-breed instrumentation and operational tools that give you an unprecedented level of visibility into how VMs are connected to and through the
virtual and physical network.