VMworld Roundup: F5, Fusion-io, Radware, Virtensys

There's been a flurry of announcements from VMware vendors, during the 2011 VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

F5 and VMware combine to help migration and desktops.  F5 Networks (FFIV) announced enhanced capabilities for data center-to-data center live migration and desktop virtualization deployments. Combining F5 BIG-IP products, vSphere and EMC's VPLEX Metro customers have a globally coherent active-active storage virtualization platform.  F5 also introduced capabilities to help customers further accelerate virtual desktop environments. "Our technology partnership with F5 continues to produce value for joint customers seeking to implement dynamic virtual desktop infrastructure solutions," said Raj Mallempati, Director, End-User Computing Product Marketing at VMware. "Through focused integration efforts, we’re able to offer organizations the ability to perform live migrations between data centers and efficiently scale VMware View virtual desktop deployments. BIG-IP solutions extend the capabilities of VMware View solutions, helping customers further automate and configure application and desktop delivery infrastructures to ably support their cloud environments."

Fusion-io unveils ioCache virtualization. Fusion-io (FIO) announced their ioCache solution customized to deliver Fusion Powered performance for the virtualization of even data-intensive enterprise applications in VMware environments, including environments that use vMotion. Featured in this solution is a new purpose-built ioMemory product dedicated to accelerating Fusion's ioTurbine virtualization caching software. When deployed in a VMware environment, Fusion’s ioTurbine software dynamically provisions ioMemory capacity and I/O performance across multiple virtual machines (VMs) by using Fusion’s VSL OS Subsystem to house and serve data for each VM. Key benefits of ioCache include acceleration of virtualized applications, increased VM density per physical server, lowered I/O demands on the external storage, lower software licensing costs associated with fewer physical servers and lowered operational costs associated with data center floor space."“As enterprises continue to try to meet growing demand to process more data faster through cloud infrastructures and virtualization, we believe that Fusion’s new ioCache solution will serve as a fundamental building block that provides the scalable data caching required in these environments," said David Flynn, Fusion-io Chairman and CEO.

Radware and Vmware joint Plug-in solution. Radware (RDWR) announced a powerful, new solution that allows VMware vCloud Director users to simplify provisioning of virtual applications to include virtual ADC resources.  The joint solution enhances Radware's vDirect plug-in which interoperates with vSphere to enable services provisioning with vCloud Director, allowing VMware vApps users to provision both application resources and a fully configured Radware virtual application delivery controller (vADC). By combining vDirect -- an ADC management plug-in -- with VMware vCloud Director, IT managers can provision vApps while also provisioning virtual application delivery services with the needed capacity according to the VMware vCloud Director organization SLAs. "Radware vDirect integrates with VMware vSphere to provide customers a transparent and seamless way to align Radware's ADC fabric with VMware vCloud Director," said Dan Chu, Vice President, Cloud Infrastructure and Services, VMware. "VMware vCloud Director end users – especially those incorporating a -cloud and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) strategy – will benefit from vDirect as they can use the solution to accelerate the delivery and consumption of virtual IT services and deploy workloads on shared infrastructure with maximum agility."

Virtensys PCIe-Sharing solutions.  Virtensys announced two new Virtensys VIO-4000 models: the VIO-4010 and the VIO-4012. These new products incorporate the Virtensys  PCIe sharing technology and Micron Technology’s high-performance RealSSD P300 and P320h enterprise solid state drives to help organizations remove I/O bottlenecks and extend the scale of today’s virtualized data centers. The VIO-4010 allows up to 16 servers to access a pool of shared SSDs, with each server accessing their own partition of high-performance storage. Acting as a'host cache' it can be an extension of the hosts's memory for swapping related functions. "Virtensys provides data center administrators with innovative new ways to experience the benefits of enterprise SSDs through their consolidated infrastructure models,” said Gary Gentry, general manager of the enterprise division of Micron’s NAND solutions group. “By leveraging Micron’s SATA and PCIe solid-state solutions, Virtensys is able to provide customers with a fast, reliable and power efficient approach to virtualized storage."