Held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this past week, VMworld played the backdrop for a number of new-product announcements made during the event. For those who didn’t make it, either physically or virtually, here is a brief roundup of the news:
Powerhouses VMware and HP announced a joint partnership developing a solution to manage both physical and virtual infrastructures through the VMware vCenter. HP’s announcement stated, “Virtual desktop infrastructure is a server-based computing model that gives users a PC desktop experience, while securing all applications, management and processing in the data center.”
“VMware and HP have joined together to help customers maximize their return on investment in virtualization, continuing our longstanding relationship of deep technology collaboration,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, Server Business Unit, VMware. “The new HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter™ Server combines two industry-leading management solutions to offer customers the best of both worlds through ‘single-pane-of-glass’ infrastructure management. The solution will help customers manage virtualized environments more easily, with familiar tools that their IT staff has been trained on. At the same time, customers will be able to improve operational efficiencies by spending less time on maintenance issues and more time building out solutions that will help increase revenue.”
HP Insight Control customers are entitled to the VMware vCenter integrations when they purchase an HP Insight Control license. Pricing starts at $349 per server. The software is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2010.
Adaptec showcased its Unified Serial Storage Controllers with SSDs for managing high-performance hybrid arrays (HPHAs). HPHAs were designed to provide power, and thus, cost savings of up to 50 percent over HDDs.
Continuous availability and disaster recovery expert, Neverfail, launched its latest new-product offering for VMware’s vSphere4: vAppHA. vAppHA integrates the same technology with VMware High Availability (HA) and VMware VMotion to ensure protection against application outages. The software continuously monitors and analyzes the health and state of Tier-1 applications running within virtual machines. Neverfail also launched Neverfail 6.0.
Xiotech introduced VM Storage Solution Lite, designed to simplify storage management in virtual environments. “We created the VM Storage Solution Lite for organizations who want a flexible and scalable storage architecture, easy management of virtualized storage and a lower price point without sacrificing functionality or value,” said Xiotech vice president of marketing Mike Hoch. “Because the solution can easily evolve into our larger VM Storage Solution, and it’s covered under our Cash for Disk Clunkers deal, it’s an ideal option for first-time SAN buyers or organization wanting to scale up as their data centers grow.”
Akorri and 3PAR announced that they have partnered in a cooperative marketing and sales agreement. Akorri’s BalancePoint 3.0 is interoperable with 3PAR’s InServ Storage Server series storage arrays.
IBM launched a public desktop cloud service. The new IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud subscription service helps clients virtualize desktop computing resources and provide a logical, rather than a physical, method of access to data, computing power, storage capacity and other resources.
LSI announced new software drivers for the 3ware 9650SE and 9690SA series RAID controller cards for VMware ESX and ESXi 4.0.
A peek at some of the Tweets from the conference reveals some disappointment in accessibility to the labs as well as the quality of the information. However, VMworld staff followed comments and tried to help. VMworld opened the conference to virtual attendees – perhaps this is the wave of the future.
