VMware set to transform cloud computing

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 21 April 2009 12:20

Business IT - Technology

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The product comes with fault tolerance built in: it is able to make use of multiple standard hardware units to duplicate any process across separate hardware so that, in the event of a failure the process continues uninterrupted. "We have built in fault tolerance. Previously customers would have to invest millions of dollars in hardware now it is available at the click of a mouse," Harapin said.

vSphere 4 is also designed for SMEs, Harapin said You can get fault tolerance disaster recovery and continuous availability starting from $1000. If you were a small council with three service you could make critical apps like your rates fault tolerant."

VMware claims that vSphere 4 can deliver capital and operational expenditure cost savings over and above what was possible with the previous generation VMware Infrastructure 3: about 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios; up to 50 percent storage savings by enabling virtual machines to consume storage only as needed; up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings with VMware Distributed Power Management which uses VMware VMotion to automatically place all virtual machines on as few physical servers as possible without compromising service levels, and power down physical servers that are not needed."

VMware claims that "The power savings with VMware Distributed Power Management across all VMware vSphere 4 customers over one year could power a country the size of New Zealand for 10 days."

VMware vSphere 4 is expected to be generally available later in Q2 2009 and will be available in six editions.  It  is claimed to support to 1 TB of RAM and 64 logical processing cores. "With support for up to 256 GB of RAM and eight virtual CPUs per virtual machine, nearly 100 percent of resource-intensive workloads such as high-end databases are suitable for virtualisation,"

VMware has also introduced a new service within the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (VAM) to help businesses explore cloud computing offerings based on VMware software.

The new services include a beta release of VMware VAM App on Demand, which enables businesses to evaluate software in the cloud, as well as free trials of VMware vCloud partner offerings.

VAM App on Demand significantly simplifies the evaluation of an application for users, by allowing them to select an application, and deploy the application in the cloud, without incurring hardware and set up costs. This includes complex infrastructure software like security, storage, and traffic management solutions, as well as business applications and application middleware stacks. VAM App on Demand is currently in beta and will pilot with various virtual appliances that can be run in the cloud.

VMware says "The VMware VAM is the premier location for finding ISV and developer-generated virtual appliances with more than 1,000 virtual appliances available. The upgraded VMware VAM includes new features for ISVs and developers to manage and track information and customer leads about their appliances, community resources such as reviews, whitepapers, and blog postings, and listings for VMware vCloud service providers for running virtual appliances.