Aviatrix Adds Oracle Cloud

At Oracle’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco this week, Aviatrix announced it has extended its multi-cloud security and networking software to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The startup says enterprise OCI managers can enjoy the same benefits Aviatrix offers for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

Specifically, Aviatrix overlays public cloud environments with network and security software, which it orchestrates via its own controller. The vendor says the resulting “multi-cloud backbone” not only takes the strain and cost out of setting up and managing workloads across various clouds, it also improves public cloud performance.

For instance, Aviatrix sets up and manages connections for multiple OCI virtual cloud networks (VCNs) using a hub-and-spoke approach it says improves on the limitations of OCI’s traditional method of linking VCNs via local peering gateways.

This sounds like the kind of performance enhancement Aviatrix also claims for its AWS Transit Gateway, to which it added setup and management of Palo Alto Networks’ VM-Series firewalls for AWS in June. At that time, Aviatrix boasted it could deliver “better-than-10x increase in network throughput to the firewall, allowing the VM-Series to operate at optimal performance.”

It’s not clear yet whether this kind of fancy firewall footwork will be offered initially with the new Oracle OCI software, although it seems to be needed by OCI customers. In a public statement, Aviatrix says that “[s]ervices that are immediately available include advanced transit networking, network segmentation, smart SAML VPN and site-to-cloud VPN access, cloud to Internet egress filtering, and much more.”

It’s that “much more,” such as improved firewall performance, that Aviatrix must continue to deliver if it means to compete against what the cloud providers are offering alone and with other partners. That’s a tall order. VMware, for instance, seems intent on covering all bases in multi-cloud networks.

Notably, Aviatrix’s CEO Steve Mullaney was the CEO of Nicira, one of VMware’s most visible acquisitions in this space -- $1.26 billion in 2012. Certainly, this makes Aviatrix familiar with the needs of enterprises intent on extending their multi-cloud workloads. The challenge will be to make that knowledge work to push this startup ahead of a growing throng of competitors.