Cloud News from VMworld: Software, Software-Defined Infrastructure and More

Brought to You by Talkin' Cloud

VMworld 2016 is underway in Las Vegas this week. Here are the latest news and product announcements related to cloud computing that have emerged from the event so far.

The VMworld conference is now in its twelfth year. That makes it pretty old for a technology event. And in an era when virtual machines are old news, VMworld lacks some of the luster of its earlier days.

See also: VMware Reassembles Its Cloud Stack with a New ‘Foundation’

But that doesn't mean there have been no notable announcements from the event. In the realm of cloud computing, the interesting announcements so far have centered on the following areas...

Cloud Storage

High-performance solid state disk (SSD) storage is a hot topic at VMworld this year. Samsung and VMware have announced a partnership to build data center server racks based entirely on solid state disks, along with software-defined software. Kingston also took advantage of VMworld to announce a new SSD product tailored for the data center. In a similar vein, Tegile Systems unveiled a cloud storage platform composed of flash.

No one is saying that SSD storage is cheaper than commodity storage. But with more SSD options than ever on the market, running data-intensive cloud servers on SSD storage should become feasible for more organizations. With SSD storage also comes higher performance, since SSD support much faster read and write cycles.

Scale-out storage that can support large volumes of data is also a focus of vendors at VMworld. Scality announced a partnership with OVH to deliver perabyte-scale storage pools, with the aim of making cloud storage easier in the age of big data.

Software-Defined Infrastructure

Not surprisingly, vendors are also using VMworld to highlight converged software-defined infrastructure solutions. That means platforms that combine software-defined networking, storage and hardware virtualization in order to build more agile and flexible clouds.

Dell made several announcements in this vein. The most significant is expanded support for Dell's VMware Virtual SAN product suite. Dell also unveiled support for the VMWare Blast Extreme protocol, a solution for building thin client desktop infrastructure on Windows.

In addition, Nexenta has debuted the general availability of software-defined storage platform, NexentaFusion 1.0. The platform combines virtual storage with data analytics.

Disaster Recovery (as a Service)

Last but not least, Axcient announced an updated disaster recovery product, which is delivered as a cloud service. Called Fusion, the product has been enhanced with automation and orchestration features that are designed to simplify the data recovery process.

This first ran at http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-events/cloud-news-vmworld-software-software-defined-infrastructure-and-more