Melbourne IT world's first to go live with VMware vSphere 4

By Stan Beer
Thursday, 21 May 2009 11:01

Development

Melbourne IT has flipped the switch on vSphere 4, making the Australian web hosting provider the first company in the world to go live with VMware's new virtual infrastructure platform. VMware introduced the vSphere 4 platform in April and today announced its general availability.

“The new virtual machine size limits and the performance enhancements in VMware vSphere 4 will help us meet the performance needs of our larger corporate customers while new scalability features such as Hot Add and Hot Plug will enable us to scale up our applications to meet business requirements without any downtime,” said Glenn Gore, chief technology officer, Melbourne IT.

“This will allow us to grow and deliver the necessary resources to even our most resource intensive applications, extending the benefits of VMware vSphere 4 to our entire datacenter.”

VMware vSphere 4 is claimed to extend the previous generation VMware platform – VMware Infrastructure 3 – along three dimensions: efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications in large scale environments, control over application security and service levels, and preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

VMware's newly appointed chief operating officer, Tod Nielsen, has been in Australia the past week touting vSphere 4 to hundreds of prospective clients, with the help of local senior executives from partners such as Intel, Cisco, HP, IBM, Dell, BMC and NetApp.

Nielsen, who was formerly CEO of Borland, told iTWire that vSphere 4 has the backing of all major industry players and has been getting an enthiusiastic reception from the company's existing customers.

"We're super excited by the reception we're getting from customers," Nielsen said.

"When customers virtualise their operations they do the easy things first. However, when they get to critical applications such as SAP and so on they get reluctant. vSphere 4 extends the robustmess of virtualisation because it can handle ;arge volumes of data and traffic.

"VMware can now run a company's business not just an appication. It is now the platform of the datacentre.

"This is allowing VMware to move to the [corporate] desktop. The desktop is no longer machine specific - companies now worry about users not devices."

“With VMware vSphere 4, we are once again raising the bar significantly for businesses that desire to dramatically improve IT performance,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, VMware.

“The cost savings associated with virtualization are undeniable, and as more customers standardise on VMware to drive 100 percent virtualization, they are realising the additional benefits that our solutions deliver, including increased flexibility and agility.”

VMware vSphere 4 is claimed to enable capital and operational cost savings over and above what was previously achievable, including 30% increase in consolidation ratios, 50% storage savings, and 20% additional power savings.

Customers are said to be harnessing VMware vSphere 4 to bring the benefits of cloud computing to their datacenters, creating cloud computing infrastructures that span internal IT with external cloud service providers.

“VMware vSphere 4 is the core of our cloud computing initiative because it gives us the cost savings and scalability benefits of cloud computing, with the choice to deploy any application or OS without getting locked into any particular architecture,” said Christopher Rence, CIO at FICO.