VMware is pushing its network virtualizer and its micro segmentation, and we see possibly similar stuff with cognitive radio or soft radio wireless (great in those contexts,) but the question here is, is VMware’s approach just more server centralization with a layer if of software abstraction to make up for it? Their marketing goes like this: your enterprise network hardware is pile of backwards outdated inflexible dumb switches that you can’t do anything about, but we can wrap everything in your buildings up in software and slice and dice in our software space and you will feel better about the situation. It seems like trying to apply part of the SAFE strategy to the data center but it seems like it makes the data center into one diced up server. It may not be the worst idea, but it seems like it would be missing the scale to deliver any real gain, that its still a centralizer. Call it cosmetic decentralization.
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It has nothing to do with decentralization.
The “dicing up” has already been done: large monolithic servers have been replaced by small single-purpose virtual servers, and that’s a good thing.
Now that the components of the software infrastructure cannot interfere with each other other than through (virtual) networking, there is a possibility to better isolate them from each other (i.e. not just from the outside world: applying the principle of least privilege) through fine-grained firewall rules, and that’s what this whole micro-segmentation business is about.