VMware Acquires Arkin to Help Accelerate Adoption of VMware NSX and Software-Defined Data Centers

VMware announced a new acquisition of a relatively unknown company, Arkin Net, a provider of software-defined data center security and operations.  Although financial details of the transaction were not disclosed, VMware did say that they expect the transaction to close by the end of June 2016. The deal is expected to help enhance VMware’s ability to build and manage virtual networks tied to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines.

Arkin is an established business partner of VMware, and it was founded in 2013 to bring management enhancements to virtual networks.  This year, Arkin was named by Gartner as one of its "Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking."

Organizations globally are adopting a software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture based on VMware virtualized infrastructure and management to deliver automation, security and continuity for applications.  SDDC breaks down the barriers between traditionally disparate domains of compute, networking and storage.  This evolution requires an operational model that delivers cross-silo visibility and collaboration.  With the acquisition of Arkin, and through the integration of VMware vRealize Suite, cloud management teams will have access to a new generation of planning, troubleshooting and automation platform that provide visibility and control across the entire data center environment.

VMware NSX network virtualization is being widely adopted in large scale production deployments as part of the SDDC where cross-silo visibility and collaboration is critical. 

"Arkin customers have already achieved significant reductions in troubleshooting times from hours to minutes," said Ajay Singh, VP and general manager of VMware’s Management Suites Business Unit.  "With the acquisition of Arkin, and through the integration of vRealize Suite, cloud management teams will have access to a new generation of planning, troubleshooting and automation tools that provide visibility and control across the entire data center environment."

In addition, Arkin addresses key benefits throughout the management lifecycle, including:

• Pre-deployment: A pre-assessment tool that will provide an understanding of the traffic patterns in the datacenter.
• Deployment: With concepts like micro-segmentation planning baked into the product, customers will now be able to plan and deploy NSX security faster.
• Post Deployment: By delivering visibility across virtual and physical for both network and security, concepts like time machine, natural language search based troubleshooting and contextual analytics customers are seeing significantly lower time to resolution.

 Today, VMware vRealize Operations provides extensive management across both physical and virtual compute and storage environments.  With the acquisition of Arkin, VMware vRealize Suite will have the ability to extend across the entire SDDC, including the VMware NSX network virtualization layer.

"Arkin and VMware have been great partners and we’re now excited to join the VMware family to take Arkin to the next level," said Shiv Agarwal, co-founder and chief executive officer, Arkin. "Arkin delivers a new operations paradigm that has been built from the ground up for VMware NSX network virtualization and is fully aligned with the core NSX use cases of IT automation, security and application continuity."