vSphere 4 facilitates the delivery of IT infrastructure as a service to enterprise users, so their IT departments can build their own private cloud systems to provide business services internally for the company and for its trusted partners, supply chain participants and other business associates.
VMware on April 21 launched what it claims to be the first operating system specifically engineered for cloud computing with vSphere 4, the first major upgrade to its frontline product since 2006.
vSphere 4, formerly called VMware Infrastructure, will be made available in the second quarter of 2009, the company said.
vSphere 4 is designed to facilitate delivery of IT infrastructure as a service to enterprises, so IT departments can build their own private cloud systems to provide business services internally for the company and for trusted partners, supply chain participants and other business associates.
In short, VMware wants to become the system of choice to run enterprise data centers, and further, to enable these complex systems to reach out and touch others in order to gain business advantages.
"Cloud computing has become known as the next big thing and is now sort of a buzzword, but we believe that with vSphere 4, we can make cloud computing a reality," Bogomil Balkonsky, VMware's vice president of product marketing for servers, told eWEEK.
"It's the first iteration of VMware's virtualization as an enabler for cloud infrastructure. It scales higher, runs faster, offers more automated management technologies."
A lot of the recent talk about this new computing services model, Balkonsky said, has been focused on public external clouds -- such as Amazon EC2 and S3, GoogleApps, Salesforce.com and others.
"Those will all have a very interesting effect on the industry, but we believe where the action is going to be in cloud computing, in the next few years, is helping companies build and transform their internal infrastructure into internal clouds, or internal cloud providers," Balkonsky said..
"A company data center can act with efficiency [using this new operating system] and with the reliablity of an internal utility provider, if they want."
vSphere 4 also provides the foundation for enterprise IT departments to connect their own homemade private clouds behind a firewall with those of partners -- or established public cloud services, like those noted earlier.
Why is VMware calling this an operating system, rather than a cloud computing architecture? Operating systems, in the classical sense of the IT term, refer to products such as Microsoft Windows, Apple's Mac OS, Linux, Unix, and AIX.
"We're calling this an operating system is because at a high level, an operating system does two things: It manages the hardware looking downward, and it provides interfaces or services with applications, looking upward," Balkonsky said.
"An operating system typically is the mediator between applications and the hardware. Our technology is the first software layer that installs on the bare metal. It provides two classes of services: A set of services to manage the hardware -- the servers, the storage, and the network -- and a set of application services to provide availability, security, and scalability to applications."
VMware designed vSphere 4 to be a non-disruptive force in the data center, Balkonsky said. The company's virtualization software works with virtually all other data center systems; vSphere 4 is designed to slip into its own layer without disrupting workflows.
vSphere 4 will be available in the second quarter in six editions, starting at $995 for three physical servers for small offices.
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