VMware's blockchain platform is ready for the enterprise
After years of development, VMware on Wednesday announced the commercial availability of its blockchain platform. The distributed ledger technology aims to provide enterprises with an open-sourced, scalable trust infrastructure for decentralized applications.
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VMware first teased its blockchain play in 2018 under the name Project Concord, promising to produce an enterprise-grade service that would enable trusted information-sharing across organizational boundaries.
Key elements of VMware's original enterprise blockchain vision included choice in deploying managed data replicas in public or private clouds, audit and compliance capabilities, enterprise-ready security and fault tolerance, and integration with other VMware offerings.
At launch, the finished product includes many of the intended features as well VMware-specific architecture and operational capabilities, including deployment, monitoring, management and support services run by VMware. On the infrastructure side, VMware said its layered architecture decouples the ledger from the smart contract language and also supports the open source smart contract language DAML.
The platform also features Scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (SBFT), an enterprise-grade consensus engine developed internally by VMware Research as part of Project Concord. The technology is meant to solve the problems of scale and performance in blockchain implementations while preserving fault-tolerance and defense against malicious attacks, VMware said. The SBFT consensus mechanism also maintains decentralized trust and supports ongoing governance in multi-party networks.
VMware is targeting financial services, healthcare and federal agencies as key customer markets for its distributed ledger technology.
"We have been focused on building an enterprise-grade blockchain platform that meets the most stringent application requirements of the financial services industry and other mission-critical distributed workloads that require reliable and high-performance blockchain services," said Brendon Howe, VP and GM of Blockchain for VMware. "VMware Blockchain delivers to customers the enterprise features they need for production today and the flexibility to adapt to future needs in the rapidly evolving blockchain space."