VMWare Redefines Hybrid Cloud with Unified Platform Offering
Hybrid cloud represents a tremendous opportunity for enterprise IT innovation. VMWare’s update of vSphere adds over 650 significant features that help IT professionals construct, maintain and deploy hybrid cloud throughout organizations. VMWare is touting its new release as the industry’s first unified platform for the hybrid cloud. The platform itself consists of:
- VMWare vSphere 6
- VMWare Integrated OpenStack
- VMWare Virtual SAN 6 & vSphere Virtual Volumes
- VMWare vCloud Air Hybrid Networking Services
In light of the announcement, CEO Pat Gelsinger said, “Today, we are taking another leap forward in helping our customers meet these demands through a unified platform, defined in software, which will offer unmatched choice and extends our innovations across compute, networking and storage to deliver the hybrid cloud.”
Being that OpenStack is included for free, VMWare customers could begin building their hybrid clouds using the integrated OpenStack operating system. VMWare mentions that they test, certify and support the specific OpenStack distribution being included with its new hybrid cloud platform.
The VMWare Virtual SAN 6 and Virtual Volumes package provides administrators with a flexible, software defined method of delivering storage though out the enterprise. This design allows organizations to allocate storage on demand within the confines of their hybrid cloud architecture. Using VMWare’s Virtual SAN 6 and vSphere Virtual Volumes, organizations can effectively deliver scalable storage solutions that have added performance over previous versions of this suite.
Officially dubbed VMWare vCloud Air Hybrid Networking Services powered by VMWare NSX, organizations can achieve one of the highest standards in cloud security when bridging their VMWare vCloud Air with their on-premises private cloud. VMWare notes that this solution helps organizations connect their clouds securely using a gateway appliance that would presumably be setup within an on-premises datacenter.
The VMWare press release describes the features as being “Available via a phased release starting in the first half of 2015.” The release goes on to mention, “VMware vCloud Air hybrid networking services will enable customers to maintain hundreds of virtual networks spanning the private cloud and vCloud Air over a single WAN connection, and share the same fine-grained ‘zero trust’ security policies and network isolation for applications, unchanged.”
