VMworld 2011 Roundup: Dell, NetApp, EMC

Building on announcements from VMware and the energy of opening day at the VMworld 2011 conference in Las Vegas many vendors had product announcements about vCloud, solutions and thin clients.

Dell's vCloud Datacenter. Dell and VMware (VMW) jointly announced the availability of the Dell Cloud based on VMware vCloud Datacenter Services designed to provide a seamless multi-tenant environment for running virtual systems. Aimed at hosting and outsourcing firms, system integrators and service providers Dell and VMware will provide the Infrastructure as a Service choice and leverage automation, workload scalability and multi-level security. The Dell vCloud Data center services will provide options for a public IaaS hosted in a secure Dell datacenter, a private Dell-built cloud on-premise or at Dell data centers, or a hybrid approach that will offer the greatest flexibility to customer requirements. The hybrid cloud will use VMware vCloud Connector to allow management of on or off premise private cloud and Dell's public cloud offering.

NetApp and VMware Joint Cloud Solution.  NetApp (NTAP) and VMware jointly announced VMware cloud infrastructure and management on NetApp, a new joint solution that enables organizations to evolve to a secure cloud computing model at their own pace, gaining greater flexibility and efficiency without needing to rip and replace their existing infrastructure. The best practices solution is well documented and offers an evolved step from virtualization to a secure private, hybrid or public cloud infrastructure. "Franklin University is committed to providing our students with the educational resources and tools they need to succeed, and our IT infrastructure is a critical foundation to ensuring that happens," said Daniel Morgenstern, manager of Windows and Virtualization at Franklin University IT. "With VMware cloud infrastructure and management on NetApp, we were able to move to a secure private cloud that offers unprecedented flexibility to expand in any direction, fluidly move resources, and quickly provision services. As a result, we've been able to optimize our resources and focus on delivering the best education to our students."  See this site for additional information.

EMC launches VSI 5.0.  EMC introduced the next generation EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) 5.0.  VSI 5 is a free VMware vCenter plug-in that let's IT achieve simple and efficient data center operations, and accelerate their trip into the cloud. With this version of VSI, EMC is providing an end-to-end integration with VMware vCenter that dramatically simplifies management of virtualized storage with the ability to map virtual machines to storage and to self service storage provisioning across EMC Symmetrix VMAX and EMC VNX families of storage platforms from VMware vCenter with full support for VMware vSphere 5. "VMware vCenter plays an important role in simplifying IT management, streamlining operational efficiency and ultimately driving down costs. IT vendor's like EMC who is investing in its Virtual Storage Integrator plugin to extend the power of VMware vCenter is signaling it not only understands customers' needs to be able to have a VMware administrator see, map and provision storage from one single console but also that it intends to protect their investments in EMC platforms," said Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst, ESG.

Wyse launches Z class thin client family. Wyse Technology announced the Wyse Z90D7 and Z90DW thin clients are now shipping. Wyse also introduced two new Linux-based members of its Z class family – the Wyse Z50S and Wyse Z50D. The Z class clients are available with AMD G-series Fusion accelerated processing units, which allows it to support the most processing-intensive applications including 3-D modeling. The new models support gigabit Ethernet, wi-fi and are compliant with the ENERGY STAR version 5.0 Thin Client specification. "Being able to combine power and performance in such an easily-managed device is something we are extremely proud of," said Param Desai, Sr. Director, Product Management, with Wyse Technology. "With the availability of Wyse Z class we've more than doubled the performance capabilities of competing top-of-the-line thin clients with similar energy requirements."