VMware Is Aiming For The Cloud

Having conquered the world of data centre virtualisation software, VMware wants the IT world to see it as a first-rank cloud computing platform provider, and as a vendor that can serve all business markets – according to the company’s chief cloud manager.

VMware’s ESX server and vSphere management platform certainly have become pervasive in the data centre, despite intense competition from Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. However, nobody doubts those two will see increased market share over time. Some analysts believe Hyper-V will stabilise at about 30 percent of the market, though the component taken by open source options such as XenServer and KVM will be harder to check.Overall, though virtualisation is booming.

Wizard of virtualisation

For now, and for the last five years, VMware has been the wizard of the virtualisation castle. VMware has deployments in nearly 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies and in many other large enterprises not included therein. Now it’s casting its nets over a wider area, planning on nabbing high numbers of smaller business fish.

VMware released a new version of its main product, vSphere 4.1, on 13 July, about 14 months after vSphere 4 started shipping. VMware hadn’t updated the platform for three years prior to Version 4. It also lowered its prices to attract more midrange and smaller businesses.

vSphere 4.1 includes improvements that most new data centre software brings to the table: faster performance, more scaling capability and better management control. The continuing growth of data in all its forms and the need for more granular control over it demands these improvements./

“A year ago, when we shipped vSphere [4.0], we talked about vSphere being a foundation for the cloud. At that time, a lot of the industry was equating the cloud [only] to services provided by Google services and Amazon services on line,” Raghu Raghuram, VMware’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Virtualization and Cloud Platforms, told eWEEK.

“Back then, we viewed vSphere as sort of industrial architecture for IT. We saw that IT has moved from mainframes, to client-server, and to the Web; cloud is the next thing. Now we’re beginning Internet-scale deployments and starting to build clouds in the data centre – private clouds. Just over the course of the last 12 months, we have seen this become a reality.”

Enterprises in general are beginning to understand the cloud concept. The more advanced ones are not only interested in what cloud services can do for them, but they’re also interested in building their own private clouds and in interconnecting those with external cloud services, Raghuram said.

“vSphere and the [management] products we have around it are aimed squarely at that proposition,” Raghuram said.