VMworld 2010 Day 3 Roundup

Another day of announcements continued Wednesday from the VMworld 2010 conference in San Francisco.

VMware and Novell expand relationship for SUSE. VMware (VMW) and Novell announced the general availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware, the first step in the companies' expanded partnership announced in June. "VMware vSphere delivers unique capabilities, performance and reliability that enable our customers to virtualize even the most demanding and mission-critical applications," said Raghu Raghuram, senior vice president and general manager, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms at VMware. "With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware, we provide customers a proven enterprise Linux operating platform with subscription to patches and updates at no additional cost, improving their ability to complete the transformation of their data center into a private cloud while further increasing their return on investment."

SingTel joins vCloud program.  VMware announced that SingTel and its Australian subsidiary, Optus, are the first telecommunications operators in Asia Pacific to be selected to join the Vmware vCloud Datacenter Service program.  “Through this relationship, SingTel and Optus can enable enterprises to extend their private cloud resources into our trusted, secure hybrid cloud solution," said Bill Chang, SingTel's executive vice president of Business Group. "This allows our customers to scale much more effectively for their peak load demands." SingTel will provide public cloud services that are powered by vSphere, vCloud Director and vShield.

HP Virtualized Storage Service. HP Enterprise Services announced a new storage management capability that helps clients better organize and manage data and improve asset utilization. Using thin provisioning and data tiering ,the Virtualized Storage Service (VSS) can help companies reduce costs and maximize utilization. "HP VSS is uniquely positioned to bring storage flexibility and elasticity to a client’s infrastructure by allowing storage to be continually optimized as the business value of aging data changes over time," said Jeff Moyer, director, Storage Services at HP Enterprise Services.

Isilon achieves VMware Ready status.  Isilon (ISLN) announced that its unified scale-out storage platform has achieved VMware Ready status, signifying that it has passed a detailed evaluation and testing process. "We are pleased that Isilon's unified scale-out storage platform qualifies for the VMware Ready logo, signifying to customers that it has passed specific VMware testing and interoperability criteria and is ready to run their mission-critical business applications and operations," said Bernie Mills, senior director, alliance programs, VMware.

3PAR and VMware scale the cloud.  3PAR (PAR) announced that cloud computing market leaders in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) segments have combined the 3PAR InServ Storage Server with VMware vSphere to build agile and efficient cloud infrastructures for their shared, virtualized "utility" service offerings. “3PAR Utility Storage is storage built for virtualized environments and the delivery of IT as a service,” said David Scott, President and CEO for 3PAR. “We believe that utility storage arrays from 3PAR and virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere are essential tools for any service provider looking to build an agile and efficient virtualized environment to meet the large-scale demands of cloud service delivery.”

Fusion-io dramatically improves I/O.  Fusion-io, pioneer of a flash-based memory tier (ioMemory) announced that it ran 512 virtual desktops on a single VMware vSphere host on the show floor at VMworld.  The company also demonstrated ioMemory technology across a fully redundant, shareable 10 Gigabit Ethernet iSCSI network.  "Fusion-io is changing the way customers think about data-center architecture, driving further efficiency, consolidation and scalability into virtual platforms," said Neil Carson, CTO of Fusion-io. "Fusion’s ability to efficiently handle the highly random access patterns prevalent in virtualized workloads, aids customers in reducing the cost and complexity of adding multiple virtual machines."

DTMF's OVF adopted by ANSI.  Distributed Management Task Force (DTMF) announced that its Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard version 1.1 has been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) standard. "ANSI adoption of OVF provides additional validation of the importance of this standard for virtualization management," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "Since its introduction, OVF has achieved wide scale adoption. We are extremely honored to receive this national recognition for our efforts to enable interoperable IT solutions for the virtual data center."