Embrane is an SDN startup that’s in the business of software defined network services. Specifically, their heleos platform abstracts compute resources, and provides distributed virtual load balancers and firewalls, i.e. not merely virtualized appliances. Embrane has announced an overlay component to heleos called vTopologies for those customers who wish to deploy lightweight multi-tenancy, i.e not a full VXLAN implementation. Here’s an excerpt from my piece on Network Computing.
vTopologies allows Embrane customers to stitch together DVAs into a cohesive layer 3 environment that’s completely isolated from other vTopologies (like any overlay). DVAs are vTopology overlay tunnel endpoints, so there’s no dependency on a hardware or software switch to perform the encapsulation. ESM acts as the control plane for the mapping of endpoints, so that DVAs know where to send encapsulated traffic to.
Aside from the mechanics of what vTopologies are doing, it’s key to consider that vTopologies are managed by ESM — not by yet another tool. For a shop that invested in heleos already, Embrane is now giving them a way to deploy a total customer environment — complete with a secure, isolating overlay — through one piece of software.
Links
Embrane Heleos: Scale-Out Distributed Virtual Appliance (Ivan Pepelnjak)