VMware Targets Hybrid Cloud Deployments

VMware ought to be feeling pretty good right about now. The EMC-owned virtualisation software kingpin is sitting in the mid-90s percentile in all the right marketing reports, meaning that more than 90 percent of the world’s enterprise workloads running in virtual machines use VMware’s hypervisor and surrounding IT.

Another key metric is that a tipping point has recently been reached in 2011, in that more than half of the world’s IT workloads are now doing their work in virtual machines. Yes, that means the entire globe. Few people would put up an argument if you called that domination of a market by one company.

Hybrid Cloud Focus For Products

As it hosts some 30,000 attendees at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, the first time the event has been held outside of San Francisco (Salesforce.com’s DreamForce is occupying that space this week), VMware launched a total of eight new or refreshed products at the conference.

Their common bond is that they are all pointed at the hybrid cloud as the next big step for IT systems – at this point, mostly for those deployed by SMBs and midrange companies.

These new products and services do not come as a surprise. The latest version of vSphere, v5.0, was introduced on July 12, with VMware positioning it as a key virtualisation tool for “people who just want [IT] infrastructure to go away”, in the words of CEO Paul Maritz.

The products officially released this week include vCloud Connector v1.5; Disaster Recovery to the Cloud with vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5; Global Connect, a new feature of the vCloud Datacentre; and a new Web service where customers can get more information and carry out trial runs of some vCloud-based cloud services.

At the conference, VMware also launched vFabric Data Director, a new Database as a Service (DAAS) solution for the enterprise.

“Virtualised infrastructures are really the new hardware,” Maritz said at the press conference at the Terra Gallery in San Francisco. “You just want to plug it in and make it work.”

Laying Out New Software And Services

Global Connect is a new feature of the vCloud Datacentre that has been added to the vCloud Datacentre Services portfolio that was introduced a year ago at VMworld. Global Connect centralises a cloud deployment by enabling customers to select from a menu of cloud services from multiple providers across geographies as if they were a single, virtual cloud. Little do the customers know how complicated the system is under the hood.

The vCloud Connector v1.5 beta features improvements involving speed, reliability and increased flexibility – as most new software claims to have. Using Connector, customers will get faster and more reliable data transfer that reduces the time to transfer workloads, especially large data sets.

vCloud Connector is now available as a plug-in to vSphere 5.0. General availability is planned for Q4 2011.

VMware’s new customer portal, a sort of social networking tool for service providers, was developed to serve as a gateway to the cloud for those ready to take the leap. The new portal simplifies the task of service providers to find partners; it also makes it possible for customers to test out services.