VMware Delivers New Innovations for the SDDC 

Today at VMworld 2014, VMware, Inc. announced new virtualization, cloud management and integrated OpenStack solutions that dramatically advance the industry's most complete product portfolio for implementing a software-defined data center, and supporting the dynamic needs of businesses.

The innovations announced today 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."

Today at VMworld 2014, VMware announced the following:

• VMware Integrated OpenStack -- VMware Integrated OpenStack is a new solution that will enable IT organizations to quickly and cost-effectively deliver developer-friendly OpenStack APIs and tools on top of their existing VMware infrastructure. The VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution will leverage VMware's proven technologies for compute, network, storage and management to provide enterprise-class infrastructure that reduces CAPEX, operational expense (OPEX) and total cost of ownership for production-grade OpenStack deployments. With the VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution, customers can quickly stand up a complete OpenStack cloud to provide API-driven infrastructure for internal developers, and to repatriate workloads from unmanageable and insecure public clouds. IT can manage and troubleshoot an OpenStack cloud with the same familiar VMware tools they already use every day, providing significant operational cost savings and faster time-to-value. Read more about the forthcoming VMware Integrated OpenStack solution here.
• VMware NSX 6.1 -- VMware is launching new capabilities for VMware NSX, including advanced network micro-segmentation capabilities, improved hybrid cloud connectivity, equal cost multi-path (ECMP) routing and VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.1 integration. With more than 150 customers, the latest release of VMware's network virtualization platform helps improve the security, scalability and performance of the software-defined data center and hybrid cloud. With VMware NSX, customers have an economically and operationally feasible way to deploy network micro-segmentation to transform data center security architecture. VMware NSX offers several advantages over traditional network security approaches, including automated provisioning, automated move/add/change for workloads, distributed policy enforcement at every virtual interface and in-kernel, scale-out firewalling distributed to every hypervisor and baked into the platform. Learn more about VMware NSX and micro-segmentation here.
• VMware vRealize Suite -- Combining the capabilities of VMware's existing cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions into a single offering under the new VMware vRealize brand, VMware is delivering a complete software stack for managing a software-defined data center and public cloud infrastructure services (IaaS). The comprehensive management platform, purpose-built to manage heterogeneous environments and hybrid clouds, enables IT to deliver infrastructure and applications at the speed of business, but with the control IT requires.
• VMware vRealize Air Automation -- VMware also introduced the first in a family of new as a service (aaS) cloud management offerings -- VMware vRealize Air Automation. Offered initially as a qualified beta, this new subscription service will enable customers to automate the delivery and on-going lifecycle management of application and infrastructure services while maintaining compliance with IT policies. Learn more about VMware's management news here.
• VMware vCloud Suite 5.8 -- The VMware vCloud Suite is an integrated offering for building and managing a VMware vSphere private cloud based on a software-defined data center architecture will enable organizations to achieve critical IT outcomes around efficiency, control, and agility. VMware vCloud Suite 5.8 will feature enhanced policy-based provisioning capabilities that will enable customers to add compute, network, security, storage and now disaster recovery services to their applications and infrastructure. The newest release of vCloud Suite 5.8 will include:
  • 5x the scale of protection -- IT organizations can set up recovery plans scalable up to 5,000 virtual machines per VMware vCenter Server using array-based replication to enable enterprise-level protection--five times larger than with previous limits.
  • Additional integration will offer customers self-service access to provision predefined disaster recovery protection tiers to new VMs via blueprints in VMware vCloud Automation Center when using array-based replication.

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."