The annual VMworld conference starts today in San Francisco and already partners are announcing new products.
Acer America said it will enter the thin client market in the fall, while Avaya Inc. revealed several turnkey solutions to help organizations deploy cloud-based collaboration applications will be ready in December.
Dubbed Collaboration Pods, the package includes virtualized networking and communications apps from Avaya, storage arrays from EMC Corp. and VMware’s vCenter and View for virtual desktops, Avaya said in a news release.
Each package will also include white label servers for delivering the apps and Avaya’s Virtual Services Platform (VSP) 7000, a top of rack Ethernet switching platform.
Also included will be integrated management and orchestration so IT departments can have a common interface to manage all pod components, Avaya said.
In an interview this morning, Jean Turgeon, Avaya’s vice-president of technical solutions marketing, said two bundles will initially be avaiable:
–a collaboration pod that includes Avaya’s Aura collaboration suite for running on VMware, an Avaya GA450 gateway for WAN connectivity as well as the storage and VSP 7000;
–and a VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) pod with VMware’s virtual desktop suite, servers and storage. The VDI pod doesn’t have Avaya collaboration components; Turgeon called it an “enabler for customers for supporting Aura in a VDI environment.” The two pods over time could “co-exist,” he said, adding that more announcments from the partners are coming.
Pricing will be announced later, but Turgeon said the collaboration bundles will be sized with servers based on customer needs. Initially the bundles will be offered to a limited number of customers in December through Avaya partners, he said, then more broadly available in 2013.
“What we’re doing is greatly simplifying the way customers can deploy a fully-integrated solution that includes networking, management, storage, virtualization — all of the necessary components to have a turnkey solution without necessarily having in-house expertise,” Turgeon said. “That can accelerate those deployments.”
“By embedding EMC’s management and storage arrays in a tightly integrated portfolio of solutions, Avaya is providing enterprise customers with simple and easy-to-deploy business communications solutions no longer requiring separate set up and configuration of their SANs to store, manage, protect and analyze the valuable information found in communications, collaboration and VDI sessions,” Rick Froehlich, EMC’s senior vice-president for OEM partnerships, said in a statement.
Acer said it will start selling its Veriton N series x86 thin clients in October, aimed at small and medium businesses, call centres and verticals including government, schools, and hospitals.
Priced starting at US$239, they will be powered by dual-core AMD G-T56N, Intel Celeron 887 or Texas Instruments-made ARM-based DM8148 processors running a choice of operating systems including Devon IT’s Linux-based DeTOS, Windows Embedded Standard 7 and Windows 7/8.
The also include Microsoft RemoteFX 3D virtual adapter, Citrix HDX desktop virtualization software and VMware View.
“Our new thin client line will help organizations meet today’s reality of ever shrinking budgets by simplifying IT without compromising on business deliverables,” Michael O’Beirne, Acer’s senior director of commercial product marketing said in a statement.
Also this morning from the conference Symantec Corp. said new solutions for working with VMware are coming. NetBackup 7.6, scheduled for later this year, will include an accelerator for WMware cloud infrastructure said to be 100 times faster than the current non-accelerated version, while NetBackup Instant Recovery for VMware cloud will recover virtual machines 800 times faster.
(This article was updated at 11:30 a..m. with comments from Jean Turgeon.)
