Rational Survivability

If you want to read about Montego Networks right off the bat, you can skip the Hoff-Tax and scroll down to the horizontal rule and start reading.  Though I’ll be horribly offended, I’ll understand…

I like being contradictory, even when it appears that I’m contradicting myself.  I like to think of it as giving a balanced perspective on my schizophrenic self…

You will likely recall that my latest post suggested that the real challenge for virtualization at this stage in the game is organizational and operational and not technical. 

Well, within the context of this post, that’s obviously half right, but it’s an incredibly overlooked fact that is causing distress in most organizations, and it’s something that technology — as a symptom of the human condition — cannot remedy.

But back to the Tech.

The reality is that for reasons I’ve spoken of many times, our favorite ISV’s have been a little handicapped by what the virtualization platforms offer up in terms of proper integration against which we can gain purchase from a security perspective.  They have to sell what they’ve got while trying to remain relevant all the while watching the ground drop out beneath them.

These vendors have a choice: employ some fancy marketing messaging to make it appear as though the same products you run on a $50,000+ dedicated security appliance will actually perform just as well in a virtual form.

Further, tell you that you’ll enjoy just as much visibility without disclosing limitations when interfaced to a virtual switch that makes it next to impossible to replicate most complex non-virtualized topologies. 

Or, just wait it out and see what happens hoping to sell more appliances in the meantime.

Some employ all three strategies (with a fourth being a little bit of hope.)

Some of that hoping is over and is on it’s way to being remedied with enablers like VMware’s VMsafe initiative.  It’s a shame that we’ll probably end up with a battle of API’s with ISV’s having to choose which virtualization platform providers’ API to support rather than a standard across multiple platforms.

Simon Crosby from Xen/Citrix made a similar comment in this article:

Officials at VMware-rival
Citrix Systems said they agreed that partnerships between security
vendors and virtualization tool providers are the way to go—as long as
everyone is on the same page. The objective is to work together with
security vendors and allow them to do their jobs across all
virtualization platforms, said Simon Crosby, chief technology officer
of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

“I would like VMware to
invite [Citrix] and Microsoft to that forum … so that there’s a common
set of APIs [that security vendors] can use to inspect against traffic,
inspect against memory and evoke security policy,” Crosby said. “I
think that’s an important thing to do. I don’t see any point in trying
to force vendors to retool for a different hypervisor.”

While I totally agree with his sentiment, I’m not sure Simon would be as vocal or egalitarian had Citrix been first out of the gate with their own VMsafe equivalent.  It’s always sad when one must plead for standardization when you’re not in control of the standards…and by the way, Simon, nobody held a gun to the heads of the 20 companies that rushed for the opportunity to be the first out of the gate with VMsafe as it’s made available.

While that band marches on, some additional measure of aid may come from innovative youngbloods looking to build and sell you the next better mousetrap.

As such, in advance of the RSA Conference in a couple of weeks, the security world’s all aflutter with the sounds of start-ups being born out of stealth as well as new-fangled innovation clawing its way out of up-starts seeking to establish a beachhead in the attack on your budget.

With the normal blitzkrieg of press releases that will undoubtedly make their way to your doorstop, I thought I’d comment on a couple of these companies in advance of the noise.

A lot of what I want to say is sadly under embargo, but I’ll get further in-depth later when I’m told I can take the wraps off.  You should know that almost all of these emerging solutions, as with the one below, operate as virtual appliances inside your hosts and require close and careful configuration of the virtual networking elements therein.

If you go back to the meat of the organization/operational issue I describe above, who do you think has access and control over the virtual switch configurations?  The network team?  The security team?  How about the virtual server admin. team…are you concerned yet?

Here’s my first Virtualized March Madness (VMM, get it!) ISV:

• 
  Montego Networks – John Peterson used to be the CTO at Reflex, so he knows a thing or two about switching, virtualization and security.  I very much like Montego’s approach to solving some of the networking issues associated with vSwitch integration and better yet, they’ve created a very interesting business model that actually is something like VMsafe in reverse. 

  Essentially Montego’s HyperSwitch works in conjunction with the integrated vSwitch in the VMM and uses some reasonably elegant networking functionality to classify traffic and either enforce dispositions natively using their own "firewall" technologies (L2-L4) or — and this is the best part — redirect traffic to other named security software partners to effect disposition. 

  If you look on Montego’s website, you’ll see that they show StillSecure and BlueLane as candidates as what they call HyperVSecurity partners.  They also do some really cool stuff with Netflow.

  Neat model.  When VMsafe is available, Montego should then allow these other third party ISV’s to take advantage of VMsafe (by virtue of the HyperSwitch) without the ISV’s having to actually modify their code to do so – Montego will build that to suit.  There’s a bunch of other stuff that I will write about once the embargo is lifted.

  I’m not sure how much runway and strategic differentiation Montego will have from a purely technical perspective as VMsafe ought to level the playing field for some of the networking functionality with competitors, but the policy partnering is a cool idea. 

  We’ll have to see what the performance implications are given the virtual appliance model Montego (and everyone else) has employed.  There’s lots of software in them thar hills doing the flow/packet processing and enacting dispositions…and remember, that’s all virtualized too.

  In the long term, I expect we’ll see some of this functionality appear natively in other virtualization platforms.

  We’ll see how well that prediction works out over time as well as keep an eye out for that Cisco virtual switch we’ve all been waiting for…*

I’ll be shortly talking about Altor Networks and Blue Lane’s latest goodies.

If you’ve got a mousetrap you’d like to see in lights here, feel free to ping me, tell me why I should care, and we’ll explore your offering.  I guarantee that if it passes the sniff test here it will likely mean someone else will want a whiff.

/Hoff

* Update: Alan over at the Virtual Data Center Blog did a nice write-up on his impressions and asks why this functionality isn’t in the vSwitch natively.  I’d pile onto that query, too.  Also, I sort of burned myself by speaking to Montego because the details of how they do what they do is under embargo based on my conversation for a little while longer, so I can’t respond to Alan…