January 15, 2015 — Ottawa, Canada — Integra Networks, one of North America’s leading providers of virtualization solutions, announced today that it has aligned with VMware to become Canada’s leading provider of VMware’s NSX™ Network Platform.
Integra, renowned for its expertise with VMware solutions—it has been a key presenter at multiple VMworld events over the past several years—will now be able to provide customers with the new virtualization and security platform for the software-defined data center. The new offering brings virtualization to a company’s existing network, transforming network operations and economics.
“This new offering is poised to be a tremendous benefit to our customers,” commented Nagwa Koressa, President of Integra Networks. “The technological implications of VMware’s NSX span the gamut from agility to dynamic extensibility, to security and micro segmentation, to dramatically simplifying operations. Furthermore, with our extensive history with VMware combined with our highly skilled and exclusive talent pool, our clients will not only experience everything listed above, but also a completely non-disruptive deployment. All in all, this promises to be a banner year for both Integra and its customers.”
NSX provides an overlay for virtual networks using the underlying physical network. Operators do not need to interact with the physical network or the complexity of manual configuration of VLANs, ACLs and firewall rules, making the physical network truly rack-once-wire-once. Network operators automate network provisioning and streamline network design, eliminating the complexity and risk associated with manual configuration changes.
NSX can be deployed non-disruptively on top of an existing physical infrastructure. Similar to server virtualization, NSX network virtualization allows companies to treat the physical network as a pool of transport capacity, with network and security services attached to virtual machines (VMs) with a policy-driven approach. NSX works with existing applications and workloads, hypervisors, cloud management platforms, and physical network hardware from any vendor.
VMware NSX security and micro-segmentation features prevent threats from moving laterally in the data center and has been validated by industry influencers like Forrester Research. Kernel based scale-out capacity and performance, distributed enforcement and automated provisioning and management makes NSX-based secure micro-segmentation scalable, operationally feasible and cost effective.
As it relates to agility, NSX reduces the time to provision multi-tier networking and security services from weeks to minutes, allowing these services to be coordinated with server and storage provisioning for faster application deployment.
Additional key features also include dynamic extensibility: NSX is a distributed platform that enables third-party services to be inserted into the service chained as specified by application policy at run time. It also delivers unparalleled visibility: the NSX controller consolidates all configuration state and instrumentation data for all network connections. Operators use existing tools to create a centralized view of the virtual network, as well as the mapping between virtual networks and the underlying physical network topology.