Our team of analysts in San Francisco offered their thoughts on the highlights of the first day of VMworld:
Jason Buffington, Senior Analyst
VMware’s hybrid cloud announcement includes some great enhancements in SRM and vCloud Air around Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). Take a look at my dedicated blog post on the why these enhancements are good for the broader data protection ecosystem.
Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst
VMware EVO figures
VMware’s NSX adoption increases
Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst
- Turning infrastructure into software by delivering an integrated EVO SDDC system built on software and delivered on standard x86 hardware
- Delivering vSphere integrated containers and their new Photon platform
- Enabling customers to embrace unified hybrid cloud experience designed with a single management platform
- Extending a logical network to the cloud with NSX to removing a major bottleneck while maintaining security benefits
Scott Sinclair, Analyst
From the storage side:
- VMware is augmenting its virtual SAN (VSAN) product with greater performance and enterprise high availability.
- VMware sees EVO Rail are the foundation for delivering the software defined data center. Delivering storage technology integrated as a larger software solution. This is yet another example of how VMware is influencing the direction of the storage industry, expanding on my write up today in Network Computing.
Dan Conde, Analyst
VMware is now offering VMware Validate Designs for several SDDC use cases. The next step is to finalize designs that are proven by experts that enable you to choose pieces that are tested, compatible and easy to upgrade.It results in a quicker way to realize value.
Mark Peters, Practice Director and Senior Analyst
The tagline for the event is "Ready for Any". Apart from the troubling semantics, that is a good summary of the overall intent that VMware has to support "anytime, anyplace, anyhow" apps and IT. If that sounds a bit like there's no dramatic strategic shift then that's because there is not!
While that doesn't lead to the most hype-filled and excitement-packed event, it's actually very good for users. Imagine if VMware were, say, a transportation company, with a car strategy one year, spaceships the next and bicycles the year after. Constant strategic shifts can do more harm than good, especially when one is discussing such a core element of integrated IT. So the real interest and drama is mainly at a level down from some wild, but purely aspirational, new BHAG initiative.
If I turn to my major area of focus - storage - then, for example, VMware was clearer than ever that its 2000+ VSAN users are just a beachhead, with a direct intent to add the necessary scale and functionality to be offering a "genuine enterprise storage platform" in quarters rather than years. Indeed, that's a great example of how VMware is subsuming its raw VMs to be a "fabric" under - and supporting - a whole range of more valuable virtualization layers in the move to what it calls "one cloud".
Steve Hendrick, Principal Analyst
VMware is taking an aggressive prescriptive stand on how to leverage containers. Docker today is about build, deploy, and run. Note the word management is currently missing. VMware has appropriately seized on this and has made it a cornerstone of their lightweight Photon-based VM/Container strategy. This clearly gives VMware some running room in the short term while they determine how to craft a multi-container-per-VM solution.