LAS VEGAS – VMware has been busy with new announcements at its annual VMWorld convention, being held in Las Vegas from Aug. 28 to 30, with its latest focusing on updating data centres.
The company has unveiled new releases for its VMware Integrated OpenStack and VMware vRealize Network Insight to help its enterprise IT customers modernize their data centres, as well as a new VMware vSAN offering to accelerate the adoption of expanding IT services.
“Companies are focused on digital transformation to deliver new customer experiences through applications and services,” Rajiv Ramaswami, chief operating officer of products and cloud services at VMware, says at VMWorld. “VMware is helping its customers to modernize IT infrastructure and application services with the speed, security, and agility that enable them to drive transformation from the data center to the edge. These new product releases and solutions will help support customer business innovation and growth while optimizing their total cost of ownership.”
VMware Integrated OpenStack is a system allowing enterprise-grade OpenStack cloud to run on top of VMware virtualization technologies. Now, the product will be based on the latest OpenStack release, Ocata, and “boost support for containerized applications,” the company says. Specifically, this update will enable enterprises to run containerized applications alongside traditional applications in production on OpenStack, and will let them use increased automation through integration with VMware’s vRealize Automation product.
VMware vRealize Network Insight provides intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security, and helps customers build an optimized and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. VMware has launched vRealize Network Insight 3.5 today, which will provide deeper visibility into networking and security infrastructure so that customers can better monitor deployments on NSX, the company’s virtualization and security platform, and meet payment card industry (PCI) compliance.
Brandon Lovelace, network administrator for Santa Barbara City College, says that community colleges are “challenged to provide stronger information security on a limited budget and with a small IT team.” He explains that he is looking forward to the new capabilities of vRealize Network Insight 3.5 helping him “drastically reduce the amount of effort and time required to plan, deploy, and scale SDDC networking and security infrastructure.”
These updates are geared towards increasing business and developer agility, while introducing more networking and security capabilities. Both VMware’s new Integrated OpenStack 4 and vRealize Network Insight 3.5 will be available by Nov. 3, 2017.
Lastly, vSAN powers hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions and is a core building block for the Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC). The new vSAN 6.6 is the basis of the latest VMware HCI Acceleration Kit, which combines “affordable enterprise infrastructure with familiar, common management from the data center to distributed environments.”
This new product delivers “server economics to enterprise storage environments” and can be deployed on a wide range of hardware platforms certified by VMware.
This is meant to accelerate the adoption of distributed IT by reducing costs and the complexity of expanding enterprise IT features beyond the data centre.
“IT has embraced hyperconverged solutions in the data center to run business-critical applications, but there is also demand for hyperconverged outside of the data center,” says Eric Sheppard, research director at IDC. “With its new HCI Acceleration Kit, VMware will help to extend hyperconverged infrastructure beyond the data center by delivering a solution that can be managed by IT generalists and is targeted at healthcare, financial services and retail vertical markets at compelling price points.”