Infrastructure
VMware: Virtualisation is 'the new mainframe'
We can run any enterprise application, any time, anywhere
By James Niccolai, IDG News Service | IDG News Service | Published 10:00, 22 April 09
"Virtualisation is the mainframe for the 21st century," said Stephen Herrod, VMware's CTO, at an event to launch the company's new vSphere 4 software, an update to Virtual Infrastructure 3, at its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
VMware says the software will allow companies to transform their data centers into a "virtual compute cloud," where applications can be moved fluidly across compute, network and storage resources to wherever capacity is available. It's due for release by the end of the quarter.
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VMware's goal yesterday was to convince customers that virtualisation, widely used for server consolidation and to set up test and development environments, is now reliable and scalable enough to run large databases and other critical applications.
The message was hammered home by a lineup of industry bigwigs that included Michael Dell, Cisco's John Chambers, Intel senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger, and Joe Tucci, chairman of EMC, which owns a stake in VMware.
"We can see from the demonstrations and the testimonials today that there are no applications -- no applications -- that can't be run in a virtualised environment," Tucci said.
At the heart of VMware's claim are new performance capabilities in vSphere. The software can now manage a cluster of computers with up to 32 physical servers, 2,048 processor cores and 32TB of RAM, according to VMware. Perhaps more importantly for database applications, VMware says it has doubled the maximum I/O operations its software can perform, to more than 200,000 per second.
In a jab at the big systems vendors, VMware assembled a group of servers by the stage, including a Sun Sparc machine, to show how much capacity can now run in a vSphere cluster. A handwritten sign on the Sun machine had the word IBM crossed out and replaced with Oracle, which just beat IBM in a deal to acquire Sun.
