What your Dev, Engineering and sales teams can achieve by using Openstack cloud and Quantum network

Nicira NVP controller can be used together with Quantum as a plugin to enable extend virtual networking capabilities in Openstack. With NVP help the providers, operators and users can start building Software Defined Network (SDN) networks to interconnect the virtual machines.

It was predicted and by many it is seen as a natural evolution and a step forward for Openstack and cloud network in general.

We are no longer tight to static, unchangeable set of switches and routers when it comes to building and designing networks. The more flexible networking allow us to build more agile cloud infrastructures that will allow us to meet changing demands of rapidly evolving applications.

As a real business example of cloud flexibility this is a video of how Nicira is using Quantum to solve its internal infrastructure challenges for the Dev, Engineering and Sales teams: Running Quantum on Quantum @ Nicira's Multi-tenant OpenStack.

For these who don't like videos I have copied some of the key point from the presentation:

• In a physical word it is difficult to achieve full automation and implement provisioning process that can build new configuration in a few minutes only 
• This is a challenge for the operational team to deliver results in a rapidly changing environment and keep the some quality of work when your company grows fast
• There is always a risk of a human error that can potentially bring your production network down
• Most network are designed to meet only the requirements that are known initially; It is difficult to plan ahead and new changes can be impossible to implement later on
• Developers need to have a flexibility to test without a risk of bringing a company network down
• You can easily provision new isolated environments for new projects or new hires
• For better resource utilization you want to have an automation in place that allows you to tier down and spin up whole environments (cloud servers + networking) as easy as possible during a day
• Not only a compute resources have to be easy to provision but as well as interconnecting and isolating them to achieve infrastructure resources agility; This is important especially for tier application typologies where we have web, db and application servers. 
• Quickly building POC for new projects and customers demonstration
• Flexible network infrastructure allows collaboration between different development teams; breaking the network isolation boundaries in a statically built network may be impossible
• Within minutes or second you can create and build new networks as well as to decommission them
• You can add new resources and boost capacity when you need it; More flexible handling of cloud bursting; You don't have to oversubscribe resource only to meet the pick application requirements

And at the end copies of the interesting slides from the above presentation.