Last week, blue-coloured vans bearing billboards advertising Microsoft’s IT services ran down the road leading to the largest business convention complex in San Francisco, California. They served to remind the 22,500 visitors to software major Vmware’s 10th annual summit what Microsoft has on offer.
Such signs of heightening competition are emerging as Silicon Valley-based VMware makes a big splash in software-defined networking with the launch of virtualisation software and hybrid cloud services, a move that can help companies cut IT costs and optimise cloud infrastructure utilisation. Analysts say rivals such as Cisco and Microsoft cannot afford to take it lightly.
At the convention last week, top executives at Vmware said the trigger was from IT enterprises and cloud service providers keen on reducing operational delay in provisioning applications. The need is being felt at a time when traffic in servers is increasing and the flow of data is shifting directionally — from north-south in the client-server model to east-west in the era of virtualised data centres.
Code writers at Vmware are now moving the action up to the hypervisor, a controlling node in the architecture that can cut the time to make logical switching and routing in networks. The company’s new network virtualisation suite, NSX, which will enter the market in Q4 2013, layers the hardware with a software controller, giving the network agility to allocate free resources more quickly and helping enterprises optimise utilisation of their network infrastructure. The company also announced the general availability of its VCloud Hybrid Service suite, for which it will set up new data centres at Santa Clara, California, and Sterling, Vancouver, to complement capacity from the Las Vegas data centre.
Savvis Partnership
Angellos M. Kottas, Director, Product Marketing, Vmware, said the cloud entry is pivotal among the releases as it has opened up a new avenue of partnership for Vmware. Vmware has also unveiled a partnership with the Monroe, Louisiana-headquartered IT services provider Savvis, which will deliver VMware technology through its infrastructure. The franchise partnership, Kottas said, could the business model of Vmware expansion into emerging markets.
Pat Gelsinger, Chief Executive Officer, Vmware, said the launches are part of a larger strategy to move operations to software-defined IT and set up a centralised security system for networks. “Our goal for the future is to extend virtualisation to all applications, all of IT, and transform storage facilities, all through software.”
VMware had acquired virtualisation services provider Nicira in July last year for $1.26 billion. Among the top customers of Vmware are GE, Citibank Group, and eBay, which came on board with Nicira.
Martin Casado, who led Nicira and is now the Chief Architect of Networking at Vmware, talked about a fundamental shift in IT: “The change is taking place in the big data centres in Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft’s Azure — companies managing over 30 per cent of the world’s workloads — to put the functionality in software and decouple it from hardware; make them hardware agnostic. This clearly puts the incumbents on their heels.”
(The writer was in San Francisco at the invitation of Vmware Inc)