VMware, Inc. has announced new virtualization, cloud management and integrated OpenStack solutions at VMworld 2014 that advances the industry’s most complete product portfolio for implementing a software-defined data center, and supporting the dynamic needs of businesses.
The innovations expand customer choice by supporting open frameworks, as well as hybrid cloud environments based on VMware and non-VMware technologies. With a software-defined data center, organizations can reduce capital expense (CAPEX) costs by up to 31 percent with name brand, industry standard hardware, and 49 percent using commercial off-the-shelf hardware and increase staff productivity by 100 percent or more in environments employing IT as a Service.
“In an ever changing business environment, IT leaders need to have confidence that they can be brave and act with conviction in response to market opportunities,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware, Inc. “Empowered by software-defined technologies, businesses are now able to move with dramatic speed. This ability to drive real impact has made the software-defined data center mainstream among leading businesses. VMware continues to innovate making the software-defined data center more open, secure and agile.”
Software-Defined Data Center: The Answer for a Brave New IT
Businesses are at a crossroads, where IT is faced with two fundamentally opposing approaches to building and managing data centers. The first is the software-defined data center, an agile and open architecture which is secure and cost-effective. The other is the hardware-defined data center, which is a closed architecture that can be costly and time-consuming to implement and limits agility and flexibility.
“Our work within Apollo Education Group is focused on providing unique technologies and innovative solutions to the global network of academic institutions and learning platforms that we serve,” said Michael Sajor, chief information officer of Apollo Education Group. “We are working with VMware’s technology and the larger EMC Federation to deliver an automated, reliable, and scalable cloud environment to support the delivery of online learning to our students. VMware’s technology has proved crucial in dynamically scaling our cloud environment. We have, proved more agile in meeting internal customers’ needs, improved productivity, enhanced operational efficiencies, and can reach a larger community of learners through our software-defined approach to IT service delivery.”
The software-defined data center empowers customers to manage heterogeneous clouds, hypervisors and physical environments, based on both VMware and non-VMware technologies, supports open infrastructure frameworks and runs on any underlying hardware infrastructure. The software-defined data center transforms security architecture through a ubiquitous virtualization layer, and by enabling network micro-segmentation with VMware NSX network virtualization.
“We selected OpenStack to build a self-service infrastructure-as-a-service cloud to support our Agile development environment,” said Laurence Vandeyar, senior systems engineer at TradeStation Technologies, Inc., an online brokerage company. “As we evaluated multiple competing technologies on which to deploy OpenStack, we found VMware infrastructure would provide the best enterprise-class capabilities to meet our needs. With VMware vSphere, we’re able to do vMotion®, DRS and easy failover, and VMware NSX supports true 3-tier Web application development. The combination of Heat orchestration for OpenStack, vSphere, and VMware NSX, provides a solution that will give us the most value.”
