The virtualisation and cloud computing in the information technology industry have created a unique opportunity to have more agile and efficient infrastructure resources within data centres. Many companies, which provide virtualisation and cloud computing such as VMware, Cisco, HP, Microsoft and IBM, believe that they are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation with a new architectural approach.
On these lines, VMware has launched “VMware vSphere 5” and a comprehensive suite of cloud infrastructure technologies built to help customers transform IT to drive greater efficiency of existing investments and improve operational agility.
With the latest version of its server virtualisation platform, VMware is focussing on scalability. vSphere 5 will support humongous virtual machines with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs. It can process over one million input/output operations per second, which is bigger than any organisation's requirement.
The product was launched globally on July 13 by VMware's Chief Executive Officer, Paul Maritz in the U.S. The Managing Director of VMware's India and SAARC operations, T. Srinivasan, who presented the product suite to journalists here on Wednesday, said that the company's flagship virtualisation platform now came with 200 new and enhanced capabilities. All customers would have to define polices and operating parameters and the vSphere 5 would take on rest of the work.
Mr. Srinivasan said along with the release of vSphere 5, VMware had also announced new virtualisation tools such as VMware vCloud Director 1.5, vShield 5 and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5. He said the company's cloud infrastructure suite would help organisations build intelligent virtual infrastructure, which infuse highly virtualised environment with the automation, self-service and security capabilities.
VMware vSphere sets the foundation of VMware's cloud infrastructure suite, supporting the virtual and cloud infrastructure needs of enterprises, small and medium businesses, public cloud service providers and the growing virtual desktop infrastructure market. It would also introduce auto-deploy, profile-driven storage and storage DRS features to help save customers a 1,000- virtual machines environment up to a full year of administrator time.
The company also launched VMware vSphere storage appliance, a new software product that would bring the business continuity and automated resources management capabilities of VMware vSphere to SMBs without the cost and complexity of shared storage.
Mr. Srinivasan said the company's cloud infrastructure suite was supported by more than 25,000 partners, including technology partners and independent software vendors, solution providers and system integrators as well as every major global hardware manufacturer.
B. S. Nagarajan, Senior Technology Manager, VMware India, said that the key benefit of virtualisation technology was the ability to contain and consolidate the number of servers in a data centre. This allowed businesses to run multiple application and workload manager on the same server.
Mr. Nagarajan said that for enterprise IT organisations, vSphere 5 would bring the power of cloud computing to the enterprise data centre, slashing IT costs while strategically positioning them to be the IT service providers of the future. Today, companies had turned to virtualisation technologies for their servers and data centres to simplify administration, reduce management chores and operating costs. At the same time it would maintain reliability and safeguard against disasters. It was evident that virtualisation was a proven software technology that was rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute.
