VMware: Tech industry will revolve around IT as a service
VMware has announced a number of products to support a prediction that IT management will in future revolve around the management and provision of cloud IT services.
Chief executive Paul Maritz said in a keynote speech at VMworld on Tuesday that traditional IT concerns were changing, with more emphasis on building corporate IT from external services: "The traditional operating system is becoming just one of several components."
"We see industry focusing on the twin challenges of datacentre automation and datacentre management," said Maritz, adding that was important for both VMware and customers to work out how to get automated virtual workloads from private to public clouds, and back again, in a standardised, automated environment.
The company on Tuesday announced VMware vCloud Director, a product designed to allow IT managers to create what VMware calls 'virtual datacentres'. VMware said in a product overview that VMware vCloud Director allows administrators to pool computing, storage, and networking capabilities, and create tiered provisioning for users. The product integrates with VMware's flagship vSphere virtualisation platform.
VMware vCloud Director is designed to allow VMware customers to "extend their datacenter capacity to include secure and compatible public clouds and manage them as easily as their own private clouds," said the company.
Cloud security was also a focus for the company, Maritz said in his speech. The movement of virtualised workloads between private and public clouds needs security that follows virtual machine instances, said Maritz.
"We need to make sure that this new [hybrid] infrastructure not only delivers equipment security, but actually goes beyond the traditional physical infrastructure," said Maritz.
VMware on Tuesday announced three new products in its vShield security suite. VMware vShield Edge is designed to let organisations secure virtual datacentres, by providing a firewall, virtual private network (VPN), a load balancer, network address translation (NAT), and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) functions.
VMware vShield App, a security product also announced on Tuesday, is a hypervisor-based firewall, while VMware vShield Endpoint is an anti-malware product for virtual machines.
To tie in with its virtual datacentre products, VMware announced that it would collaborate with a number of telecoms companies including BlueLock, Colt, SingTel, Terremark, and Verizon, to provide virtual datacentre services.
VMware calls the provisioning of IT services to both public and private clouds 'hybrid cloud computing'. Maritz said in a press statement on Monday that its new products announced on Tuesday were the fruition of a strategy formed two years ago.
“Two years ago VMware set out a vision to modernise the datacenter [sic] and transform IT — this week we are taking significant steps forward to bring this new world of IT as a service and hybrid cloud computing to reality,” said Maritz.