At VMworld 2010, VMware, Inc., a provider of virtualization and cloud infrastructure products, announced new products and services intended to help enterprises and service providers achieve the benefits of cloud computing. The vendor says the new offerings are part of an evolution of IT to more business-centric roles.
Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, says this heralds the start of a new phase, in which "extended virtualization" provides a service layer that enables private cloud computing. "There are now more applications that are running on virtualized infrastructures than physical infrastructure," he said in his VMware keynote address. "One of the implications is that there are now more copies of traditional operating systems being deployed [virtually] that no longer see the hardware than those that do. In other words, this task of mediating access to and coordinating hardware is largely being taken over by a new layer of software that's called 'extended virtualization.' That layer now is not only mediating access to the compute resources, it will increasingly mediate access to other resources in the data center - from storage to networking. This layer is the new infrastructure."
VMware says that with its ecosystem of technology partners and service providers, customers can extend their data center capacity to include secure and compatible public clouds and manage them as easily as their own private clouds. Through this hybrid model, IT organizations can act as service providers to the business, achieving the benefits of cloud computing without sacrificing security or control.
Building on the VMware vSphere foundation, VMware's new cloud infrastructure products and services introduce a hybrid cloud model that bridges private and public clouds. VMware vCloud Director extends the resource pooling capabilities of VMware vSphere, enabling IT to create "virtual data centers" (VDCs) - logical pools of compute, network and storage resources with defined management policies, SLAs and pricing.
VMware also introduced three new products that deliver a security model designed specifically for virtual and cloud environments. VMware vShield Edge, VMware vShield App, and VMware vShield Endpoint virtualize security and edge services, including firewall, VPN and load balancing, freeing them from the constraints of physical infrastructure and providing a single, adaptive and programmable security infrastructure.
VMware also announced its vCloud Datacenter Services, which consist of interoperable enterprise-class hybrid clouds delivered by leading service providers including Bluelock, Colt, SingTel, Terremark and Verizon. VMware vCloud Datacenter Services offer VMware-certified compatibility and portability, auditable security controls, SAS-70-Type-II or ISO-27001 certifications, and virtual application security, including stateful firewall and layer two network isolation, as well as role-based access control and LDAP directory authentication.
Maritz says virtualization has expanded beyond pure hardware efficiency to meet the demands of operational efficiency. "Because we know for every dollar spent on hardware in the data center, approximately six to eight dollars is spent on operating that hardware," he says. "We want to take our customers on a journey where they can become more efficient and agile."
Maritz adds that "increasingly, we're seeing businesses realize that they're stuck with 20- or 30-year-old batch-oriented code. They're not going to be able to service their customers who have grown up in a world where they expect information on demand delivered to wherever they are to whatever device they're using. That's going to require a set of changes in the application architecture, and new applications will need to be delivered on top of this new infrastructure."
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