VMware

Overview

VMware's CEO Paul Maritz explained how virtualization lies at the heart of the evolution of the data center during his kenote at VMworld 2009. He called it an evolution that would lead to the emerging cloud paradigm, but he knows VMware will have its work cut out for itself if it is become the leader in cloud computing. Very large competitors - Amazon, Google and Microsoft come to mind - loom over the horizon.

Meanwhile, Steve Herrod, VMWare's CTO, described their cloud computing strategy as having three fronts:

1. Bring the benefits of cloud computing - resource elasticity, simplicity at scale, self-service portals and the option of charging internal customers based on resource usage - to a customer's data center. Generally, this means building an internal cloud and it's the focus of VMware's vSphere and vCenter products.
2. Be an enabler of cloud computing services by offering VMware's software and programs - vSphere, vCenter; its vCloud Initiative - to service providers, hosting companies, teclcos and other owners of external data centers. These partners, in turn, use VMware's solutions to augment and/or transform their core business with new services, like on-demand compute or storage resources, and offer them directly to their end-user customers.
3. Connect internal and external data centers together to create a private cloud. VMware proactively works with its partners to connect the internal and external clouds in areas such as application migration to and from a data center and a common management view of application assets regardless of where they're running. Their stated goal is "to provide an evolutionary path for companies to leverage externally provided data centers on their own terms and as they're comfortable with compliance, security, SLAs, data placement, or other concerns facing their business.

Finally, VMware made two recent moves to underscore their focus on the cloud. VMware announced it would acquire SpringSource, an open source vendor of enterprise Java and web application development and management software. VMware sees the two combining to "to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers." And, it announced the vCloud API as a way to cement its commitment to open standards to ensure there is interoperability and portability among, and between, public and private cloud environments.

Value Proposition

VMware claims using vSphere can result in a 50% reduction in capital costs and a 60% reduction in operational expenses per application load by automating application management and dynamically allocating resources to apps across internal and external cloud infrastructures. Thus, it lowers the cost of application operation and maintenance, while reducing the loss of revenue associated with downtime, outages and failure. VMware vCenter provides centralized control and visibility at every level of virtual infrastructure, unlocks the power of vSphere through proactive management, and is a scalable and extensible management platform with a broad partner ecosystem.

Products & Services

• VMware vSphere acts as an operating system for the data center that simplifies it by decoupling the applications from the underlying infrastructure and allows the creation of "a private cloud - a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds - delivering IT infrastructure as a service."
• VMware vCenter centrally manages vSphere environments allowing IT administrators to dramatically improved control over the virtual environment compared to other management platforms.
• VMware vCloud is a common set of cloud computing services for businesses and service providers - with support for any application or OS and the ability to choose where applications live, on or off premise; it includes the vCloud partner ecosystem and the VMware Ready vClouds.
• VMware vCloud Express offers the ability to provision infrastructure on-demand, via credit card, and pay for use by the hour; users employ the vCloud API to access and manage vCloud Express services in a compatible, interoperable manner across both internal and external clouds.