At VMworld 2011 yesterday, VMware, Inc. announced a new database provisioning and operations solution designed to deliver a database as a service model for the enterprise. Described as an extension of VMware's Cloud Application Platform strategy, VMware vFabric Data Director aims to give IT the ability to control and manage a growing set of heterogeneous databases through policy-based automation, while streamlining application development via a self-service provisioning model for developers to rapidly access the database services needed for modern applications. Built on VMware vSphere, vFabric Data Director will also extend the benefits of virtualized infrastructures to the database tier, optimizing resource utilization for increased operational efficiency and cost savings.
According to VMware, applications in the cloud era are fundamentally different than those written for previous client-server or internet architectures. Increasingly, modern applications are written in high productivity development frameworks and delivered via dynamic virtual and cloud infrastructures. In addition, applications must also account for a wider variety of web, SaaS, social and mobile platforms and exponentially higher volumes of real-time data.
To address this changing nature of applications, VMware is investing in a cloud application platform, including developer frameworks, application and data services and new cloud based Platform as a Service (PaaS) delivery models that promise to significantly increase developer productivity and operational efficiency while enabling access to the broadest range of infrastructure services from VMware, third parties and the open source community. VMware has significantly advanced the modern cloud application platform, extending the Spring community of Java developers with key framework innovations, delivering a core set of cloud application services including messaging and in-memory data services, introducing Cloud Foundry, the industry's first Open PaaS and leveraging the PaaS environment to embrace multiple modern frameworks and languages including Erlang, JRuby, PHP and Python as well as data services such as Neo4J.
With exponential growth in data to support today's applications, enterprises increasingly suffer from "database sprawl," the proliferation of under-managed, under-secured and even unknown databases across the IT organization, says VMware. Manual operations for this growing set of databases restrict the ability of developers to rapidly access and provision data services for their applications. The company says vFabric Data Director will establish a policy driven model for driving consistent security, data protection and resource consumption across an enterprise's database portfolio, and using a web-based portal, developers will be able to leverage vFabric Data Director for self-service access to a range of database services to serve their needs.
The first database supported on Data Director is VMware vFabric Postgres, a new offering from VMware based on and fully compatible with PostgreSQL. Fully ACID and ANSI-SQL compliant, PostgreSQL is an enterprise class database, with a long history of mission-critical customer adoption and support from a vibrant open source community. VMware has also completed specific optimizations of vFabric Postgres for the vSphere environment.
VMware plans to expand vFabric Data Director support beyond PostgreSQL, extending the common provisioning and operations model to a range of commercial and open source databases.
For additional details on vFabric Data Director, go to www.vmware.com/go/datadirector
For additional details on Cloud Foundry, go to www.cloudfoundry.com