VMworld 2010: Vendors Roll Out New Products

There was lots of news coming out of the VMworld 2010 conference Tuesday in San Francisco. General sessions were held and labs continued as vendors showcased their products and announced new solutions.

NetApp supports VMware View 4.5.  NetApp (NTAP) announced that the integration of its industry-leading unified storage technologies enable VMware View 4.5 customers to achieve enhanced storage efficiency and virtual desktop scalability, while improving desktop performance levels for end users. NetApp has integrated with VMware View 4.5 several critical operations such as backup and recovery, deduplication, desktop cloning, and storage system monitoring directly to desktop and server administrators.  NetApp also announced support for VMware vCloud Director software to extend NetApp's current leadership in delivering shared storage infrastructure for virtualized environments.

Brocade extends ServerIron.  Brocade (BRCD) announced the availability of leading-edge application delivery hardware and software solutions that address the needs of mid-market enterprise customers who are using virtualization and cloud computing solutions to maximize the value of their IT resources.  As an extension to ServerIron, the ADX 4000 ASM-4 bundle provides layer 4-7 switching performance in a new high-value package to help customers realize the promise of on-demand, automated data center computing.  “Our partnership with Brocade will help customers tightly integrate networking layers with the VMware platform, thereby streamlining network management and taking a significant step toward delivering IT as a service," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliance at VMware. The ADX 4000 ASM-4 module will be generally available on September 23.

BLADE announces VMready 3.0.  BLADE Network Technologies announced VMready 3.0 with Virtual Vision for automating, provisioning and securing the network in the virtualized data center. BLADE boasts VMready to be the first in the industry to provide standards-ready, scalable and non-disruptive VM-aware networking for enterprise data centers. “VMready integrates with VMware vCenter Server, enabling customers to manage the network configurations of virtual machines on both VMware vSphere vNetwork Distributed vSwitches and physical BLADE switches," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances at VMware. VMready 3.0 with Virtual Vision is available immediately.

NTT America Offers vCloud Director: NTT America, the U.S. subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation, announced that it is using VMware vCloud Director to offer cloud services to customers. vCloud Director is software that extends the resource pooling capabilities of vSphere to enable enterprises and service providers to create pools of compute, networking and storage resources. NTT said using vCloud Director would enable it to offer additional cloud services for its U.S.-based enterprise customers.

Isilon Integrates iSCSI into Unified Platform: Isilon (ISLN) said it has integrated the iSCSI protocol into its OneFS operating system, delivering the industry’s first and only unified scale-out storage platform for the enterprise. Isilon said that with its scale-out storage, users can consolidate file- and block-based applications onto a single, shared pool of storage, simplifying data management to increase resource utilization and efficiency for virtualized and non-virtualized environments.

Xsigo announces virtual i/o. Xsigo Systems announced a significant advancement in virtual I/O technology, simplifying and accelerating data center convergence. The company released an Ethernet-based version of its I/O Director, the industry's first virtual I/O technology to leverage the standard Ethernet ports found on every x86 server.  As an alternative to FCoE the new Xsigo approach delivers an end-to-end converged connectivity solution for less than $500 per server.  "This announcement marks a quantum leap forward in data center efficiency. Now the vast population of x86 servers deployed worldwide can be aggregated into private clouds of highly efficient, interchangeable resources, simply using the connectivity they already have," said Lloyd Carney, Xsigo's CEO.

Compellent Extends Fluid Data Support: Compellent (CML) will enable end-users to manage its Fluid Data storage solution from the VMware vSphere 4.1 client, building upon the foundation of Compellent and VMware virtualization to enable automated, scalable and cost-effective data centers and cloud services.