VMworld roundup: Dell, Avaya, HyTrust, Fusion-io, Trend Micro
SAN FRANCISCO -- VMworld 2013 is off to a busy start with lots of industry partners seizing upon the opportunity to get their own product announcements out the door this week. Let's look at a few of them.
Starting with HyTrust, the security and compliance solutions provider is upgrading its virtualization appliance with the purpose of enabling enterprises to more easily virtualize mission-critical applications and deploy multi-tenant private clouds without taking on "unacceptable risks."
These potential risks include potential damage caused by both employees and outsiders misusing VMware vSphere administrator privileges. A more specific example provided by HyTrust is an employee copying a virtual machine with confidential data, deleting the entire virtual data center, or misconfiguring tenant environments in shared infrastructure.
To prevent such mishaps, the update for the HyTrust Appliance 3.5 includes customizable behavior-based and threat-detection algorithms as well as support for the VMware Security Hardening Guide to conduct more than three times as many server configuration checks and remediation operations than before.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also announced that it has raised $18.5 million in a round of Series C funding.
New investors consisted of Intel Capital, Fortinet, VMware and In-Q-Tel. Existing investors included Granite Ventures, Cisco Systems, Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.
HyTrust specified that the latest pool of funds will be used to fuel expanding its sales and marketing teams along with boosting development for its cloud security platform and Role-Based Monitoring solutions.
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Avaya is pushing its new Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) framework this week as the first step in its software-defined networking roadmap.
Touted as a "simple five-step process" that could save up to months of deployment time, the framework uses Avaya's Fabric Connect technology to serve as a virtual backbone to link up datacenters for laying out software-defined networking infrastructures.
The SDDC framework also taps into the OpenStack cloud computing platform to support deployments of virtual machines and configuring networks through a single graphical user interface.
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When Dell comes up these days, most of the focus is on the business of the company itself and what that future is going to look like.
But the Round Rock, Texas-based corporation also has some enterprise products in the pipeline.
This week, Dell is beefing up its networking portfolio with a new datacenter switching platform designed for scaling larger virtual deployments but with a smaller physical footprint.
The S6000 Data Center Switching Platform is boasted to be able to double 10/40GbE densities while cutting power consumption by half.
For VMware environments, the S6000 supports VMware's NSX network virtualization controller for vCenter deployments to bridge physical and virtual environments across software-defined networks.
The S6000 is scheduled to ship during the fiscal third quarter of 2013.
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Fusion-io is rolling out its first software product for virtual desktop infrastructures that will be linked up with servers, flash memory, and storage. The Fusion ioVDI software is based upon its maker's ioTurbine virtualization acceleration software.
In the announcement, Fusion-io's chief technologist Vikram Joshi boasted that this software could make the virtual desktop experience "just as responsive as physical hardware."
The software intends to do that by processing more of the data on the server side, which should reduce the amount of data traveling across a network. Application latency is said to clock in at less than 200 milliseconds, averaging at only 10 milliseconds.
Only available in beta testing mode right now, ioVDI will be sold as stand-alone software or as an integrated solution on servers from Fusion-io manufacturing partners.
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Software-defined data centers is the topic of the week at VMworld this year.
Thus, Trend Micro is tapping into the theme du jour by collaborating with VMware on a new framework that integrates VMware's NSX networking and security platform with Trend Micro's Deep Security virtualization and data center security platform.
Aside from the top priority of providing the highest level of security possible, automation appears to be the key selling point here.
With a verbose yet still-to-the-point name, the Trend Micro Cloud and Data Center Security Solution uses agentless and agent-based protection to automatically secure virtual servers, virtual desktops, and both private and public cloud models.
Some of the tools included in the package deal are anti-malware, intrusion prevention, integrity monitoring, log inspection, and Web reputation and firewall solutions.
All in all, Trend Micro is promising that this platform should simplify provisioning and automate workflows between Trend Micro and VMware deployments.