VMworld: VMware pushes IT-as-a-service

VMware's open platform could help boost cloud adoption

VMware has used the VMworld conference to launch a series of product and service offerings designed to facilitate a hybrid cloud model and encourage the push towards IT-as-a-service.

The firm released three new sets of offerings, vCloud, vShield and vFabric.

"Enterprises are embracing a new model of infrastructure to deliver IT-as-a-service through hybrid cloud computing," said Raghu Raghuram, senior vice president and general manager for virtualisation and cloud platforms at VMware.

"The products and services we are launching today provide a comprehensive enterprise architecture that will deliver the agility and economics of the cloud with the security and quality of service our enterprise customers need."

The first of these, VMware vCloud Director, is a model for delivering and consuming services, according to the firm, and uses the vSphere cloud operating system to create what VMware described as virtual datacentres.

These are logical pools of compute, network and storage resources each with their own management policies.

VMware suggested that these virtual datacentres could be offered by IT departments in the same way as virtual machines and virtual appliances, with their own individually agreed service level agreements.

In this way, IT organisations can act as de facto service providers to the business, the vendor explained.

Also introduced was vCloud Datacenter Services, a new way for companies to extend their datacentres to external clouds in a secure and compliant way.

These services will be delivered by providers including Colt and Verizon, and consist of globally consistent infrastructure, management and security models which enable organisations to move workloads from internal infrastructure to external cloud and back, VMware said.

The vCloud Consulting Services, meanwhile, is designed to help customers implement all of the above components.

Finally, VMware announced its vFabric cloud application platform. This combines Java development tools and a lightweight application server with associated services for companies that want to build reliable load-balancing and application performance management apps for a cloud environment.

"With the rise of virtualisation and modern development frameworks, a fundamentally more productive and portable approach to delivering new applications has emerged," said Rod Johnson, senior vice president of VMware's application platform division.

"We're moving into an era where developers can build great applications and immediately deploy those applications onto a modern platform that provisions and configures itself on demand and intelligently runs and scales the application based on policy."

Robert Rutherford, managing director of consultancy QuoStar Solutions branded VMware's cloud announcements well thought-out and designed to instill confidence in the user base.

"It is a standard platform and one the industry is comfortable with. Customers can more or less build their own clouds and manage them by themselves, " he explained.

"In short, the customers can move into the cloud but it will still feel like it’s their own environment. If the customers want to bring it back in-house they can do easily, if they want to move to another provider then they can."