VMware unveils management portfolio for the Cloud era

18 Oct 2011 Palo Alto - VMware Inc., a global expert in virtualization and Cloud infrastructure, has unveiled three product suites designed to simplify and automate IT management. With significant enhancements to VMware vCenter Operations and the introduction of new VMware vFabric Application Management and VMware IT Business Management suites, VMware will help customers amplify the value of their virtual environments and achieve the agility and economics of Cloud computing.

"As IT organisations are implementing private and hybrid Clouds, traditional management approaches associated with physical distributed systems and siloed management disciplines just aren't capable of keeping up with the pace and scale of modern IT operations", stated Boaz Chalamish, senior vice president and general manager, enterprise management at VMware. "VMware's management solutions will deliver a new approach that takes advantage of Cloud infrastructure, is focused on eliminating IT complexity rather than orchestrating it, and will support IT's ability to act as a broker of services to the businesses it serves."

VMware vSphere has helped thousands of companies transform their data centres, simplifying many core systems management functions by building them into the virtualization platform. VMware's management philosophy is to continue to eliminate complexity across all areas of IT management - infrastructure, applications and the business of IT - by embedding and integrating management into its platforms, converging management disciplines to streamline processes and applying analytics to help customers achieve the degree of intelligence and automation required to deliver IT as a service.

"Capital markets customers have some of the most unique and stringent requirements for security, technology performance and platform reliability. They demand more from Cloud solutions than typically offered by those outside our industry in terms of information security, managing large quantities of data, running high-performance applications and reliably connecting to their counter-parties", stated Stanley Young, CEO, NYSE Technologies. "By tapping the power of VMware's innovations in virtual infrastructure management, we were able to bring the financial industry's first Cloud computing solution specifically built for the global capital markets community to life, and at a cost well within the reach of all market participants."

VMware's new management solutions will help customers transform how they manage infrastructure, applications and business services in virtual and Cloud environments:

• Infrastructure: The VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite: The highly dynamic nature of Cloud infrastructure has outpaced traditional operations management disciplines. Introduced in March 2011, VMware vCenter Operations simplifies and automates operations by integrating performance, capacity and configuration management and applying analytics to deliver the actionable intelligence customers need to pro-actively ensure service levels in cloud environments.

With this update, VMware will continue to deliver on its strategy of converging management disciplines with deeper integration of VMware vCenter Capacity IQ and VMware vCenter Configuration Manager. New dashboards and smart alerts will correlate performance and capacity information to identify emerging problems, help customers "right size" their infrastructure and identify and remediate performance issues caused by configuration changes. In addition, the vCenter Operations Management Suite will include new application awareness capabilities that automatically discover and map the relationships and dependencies between applications and the infrastructure components that support them. This means customers will be able to optimize infrastructure operations such as security management and disaster recovery based on application needs.

• Applications: The vFabric Application Management Suite: The move to Cloud computing and the increasing velocity of application demand are causing organisations to rethink how they develop and manage applications, driving the emergence of converged application operations models such as "DevOps". To help customers increase agility and improve application performance, VMware is introducing a new application management suite that will empower application owners to deploy and manage a new generation of applications running on virtual and cloud infrastructures.

The vFabric Application Management Suite will include two new solutions that integrate application disciplines to unite and streamline developer and operations efforts. Together, these suites support an "active application management" approach that will help IT keep up with business demand for application changes and more effectively maintain application performance and availability in dynamic environments. vFabric AppDirector will standardize and automate the release/deployment of applications to any Cloud through easy-to-create blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries, and deployment work flows. vFabric Application Performance Manager will help customers pro-actively manage application performance in virtual and cloud environments. The vFabric Application Management Suite is optimized for vFabric, but extensible to other frameworks.

• The Business of IT: The VMware IT Business Management Suite: With the rise of public Cloud services, the role of enterprise IT organizations is evolving into a broker of services to the business. This shift requires better visibility into costs, service levels and vendor operations. VMware is introducing the IT Business Management Suite, which is based on technologies from VMware’s June 2011 acquisition of Digital Fuel, to provide the rigor and discipline CIOs need to optimize the business value of IT investments and communicate IT’s value in language the business understands.

The suite will include three modules: IT Finance Manager, IT Service Level Manager and IT Vendor Manager. Together, they will aggregate data from a wide range of financial sources and apply analytics and modelling to offer a single pane of glass into IT capital, operating and service expenses with meaningful metrics and reports. The IT Business Management suite will allow CIOs to make informed sourcing decisions based on cost, risk, performance and compliance in order to operate as a broker of IT services in full alignment with business needs.

"Cloud computing requires a new way of thinking about the delivery of IT services", stated Cameron Haight, research vice president, Gartner. "Automation is key not only to enable scale, but to keep pace with the rate of change in dynamic environments. And, as the infrastructure itself becomes programmable, management tools and processes must be updated to support an integrated, agile approach that spans across the IT divide."

The updated vCenter Operations Management Suite will be offered in four editions to meet the IT operations needs of small and midsized businesses and enterprises, and is expected to be available in early 2012 with prices starting at $50 per VM. The updates will also be available as a free upgrade for current vCenter Operations customers.

To help customers more rapidly experience the tangible benefits of VMware's operations management solutions, VMware is introducing a new vCenter Operations Management Accelerator Service. The latest offering in VMware's portfolio of Operations Management Services, the new service lays the foundation for customers to begin more efficiently and effectively managing their virtual and Cloud environments.

vFabric Application Performance Manager is expected to be available in Q4 2011 with prices starting at $360 per VM. vFabric AppDirector is expected to be available in early 2012. The IT Business Management Suite is expected to be available in Q4, 2011 and will be licensed per user.