Zentera Systems
Hybrid Cloud Virtual Infrastructure to Connect Enterprise Compute Resources

The past decade has seen the enterprise data center technology shift from data center consolidation and virtualization, to data center migration and hybrid cloud. The business benefits of the cloud are compelling, however, corporate IT is facing challenges in creating a federated and hybrid network.

The Cloud and the Enterprise are disjointed infrastructures

The Cloud is outside the corporate firewall, which is not unified and is disjoint from the core corporate network and managed by multiple parties. The corporate infrastructure is complex and there are challenges to untangle the on premise unified fabric to support the move of selected applications to the cloud without affecting others—making re-engineering of the fabric a tedious task. “We believe a new network architecture is required to solve the challenge of the Cloud Federation Network. Zentera can provide just the platform that allows enterprise IT to securely provision selected applications in the hybrid cloud and a federated environment without touching or changing any of the existing infrastructure or impacting operations,” says Jaushin Lee, Founder and CEO, Zentera Systems.

Zentera’s Cloud Federation Network

Founded to develop this virtual hybrid network technology, Zentera partnered with Qualcomm to implement a network solution that connected a number of the world’s innovative vendors to Qualcomm’s secure network platform. With the same technology, Zentera now collaborates with Microsoft Azure and other Cloud Service Providers to support their customers in implementing hybrid clouds with easy deployment, security, and central management. “Almost all of the current solutions available in the industry to solve the networking and security challenges of the hybrid cloud are layer two based solutions, while through our solution we can make changes to the virtual infrastructure without having to disrupt any of the existing physical network infrastructure,” says Lee.

The company’s Cloud Federation Network features a virtual routing table that works with existing enterprise firewall systems, under enhanced security with virtual IP addresses. It overlays, decoupled from the underlying physical network routing plane, using end point tunneling with SSL encryption. “The system also deploys cloud firewalls in the cloud without using physical network topology, operating at OS level, decoupled from any hypervisor underneath.

It supports most popular operating systems, physical servers, virtual machines and the Docker container,” explains Lee.

Unique Overlay Network Approach

Zentera is unique as it is an overlay network based solution and thus does not require changes to corporate IT physical infrastructure or programming of APIs at the CSP for network integration. It makes it quick and easy to implement and avoids provider lock-in. At one instance, through Zentera’s Cloud Federation Network,a multi-billion dollar global IT solutions provider and reseller moved their data center from a provider in Dallas to another in Chicago. The overlay virtual network features with IP forwarding and end point tunneling capabilities helped the client move across datacenters without changing the old Dallas IP addresses that were hard coded into all their applications and routing tables, thus maintaining front-end application transparency. The Zentera overlay network solution can easily resolve such challenges at any customer by allowing them to maintain status quo on legacy IP addresses.

Through our solution we can create a Cloud Federation Network without changing the existing IT physical network infrastructure

Zentera stands out from the rest due to their ability to eradicate IP address collision between domains, alongside providing cloud connectors that abstract VM management APIs of top Cloud Service Providers to support self-service management. They also create a shielded virtual network on the top of existing enterprise environments setting up secure SSL based access for external partners. For the road ahead, the company will be more workflow oriented in their solutions and will adapt new capabilities around the cloud federation network core technology. “We also see many important channels developing in the future, and Zentera Cloud Federation Network will be implementing smart pipe technology to provide high speed connectivity which has the intelligence of an overlay network,” concludes Lee.