“With the rapid, and increasing, commoditization of hardware for computing, networking and storage, CIOs are increasingly realizing and embracing the need to shift from traditional IT strategies to highly virtualized and automated infrastructures, preferably running on scale-out building blocks and Ethernet,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at ESG. “Server virtualization has become the norm for compute platforms, and software-defined networking is rapidly reshaping the networking industry. To complete the transformation, Coraid is now combining its scale-out EtherDrive storage platform with its new EtherCloud automation platform to become an early leader in software-defined storage.”

Traditional storage management in highly dynamic cloud environments is complex, resource-intensive and error-prone at scale. Storage administrators are burdened with translating application requirements into storage configurations, which they then have to set up manually. Frequent changes to the environment necessitate constant monitoring and reconfiguration to ensure conformance to service level agreements (SLAs). Software-defined storage allows storage designers and operators to control how storage is deployed, provisioned and managed through software, enabling automation, templates, self-service models and a range of cloud-computing services.

The explosion of data worldwide, estimated by analysts at 50 percent annual compounded growth, is testing the limits of the economics and scalability of deploying and managing traditional “big iron” storage. Coraid’s EtherDrive storage brings simplicity, superior price-performance and just-in-time scalability to storage infrastructure. Coraid EtherCloud complements the capabilities of EtherDrive storage with a REST-based interface and policy-based automation to ensure maximum flexibility and programmability at multi-petabyte scale.

EtherCloud introduces a policy engine and automation framework that enables one-click provisioning of sophisticated enterprise storage configurations, simplifying capacity and performance management. This allows IT administrators and end users to reduce infrastructure-provisioning times from weeks to minutes. Using a rich set of REST APIs that expose every aspect of storage provisioning and operational management, administrators can easily automate complex workflows and integrate storage management into IT operations.

Key features of EtherCloud include ability to create pools of storage that can be automatically created and grown on demand, one-click instantiation of VMware ESXi virtual machines, integrated with storage allocation and networking connectivity, multi-tenancy and integration with lightweight directory access protocol/Active Directory (LDAP/AD) for authentication, metering of compute, network and storage use, as well as the ability to integrate with open networking and cloud frameworks, as well as with a variety of industry-standard file systems.

“EtherCloud breaks through the complexity of legacy storage management, replacing it with a flexible, automated, programmable platform. This allows enterprise and cloud customers to provision and manage petabytes of high-performance block and file storage with the same simplicity found in consumer cloud services,” said Anil Virmani, senior vice president of engineering at Coraid. “We are excited to enable the next generation of software-defined data centers and drive complexity out of the most challenging layer of the data center today — storage.”

“We are aggressively investing in the next-generation data center built on software-defined infrastructure to better serve our customers at scale,” said Tim Dufour, CEO of RackForce, the leading cloud service provider in Canada. “As an early access customer of EtherCloud, we are excited by its potential to automate our storage environment. This directly translates to lower management overhead, more efficient operations and better economics.”

Designed for cloud, video and big data customers, this unified storage solution is powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system combined with Coraid’s EtherDrive technology to enable scalability, performance and operational simplicity.

“Organizations are increasingly challenged to provide predictable, cost-effective file performance in the face of uncontrolled data growth,” said Carl Wright, EVP at Coraid. “By extending our product family to include a best-in-class NAS offering, Coraid can meet that challenge with a unified storage solution that takes full advantage of the scalability and performance of Ethernet SAN.”

For Cloud, Video and Big Data Workloads

Capturing, storing and analyzing ever-larger sets of human- and machine-generated data stresses the scalability of legacy NAS systems. The ZX-Series is for processing large data sets such as consumer behavior analysis or HD and 3D video format editing because it provides the throughput and scale necessary to support accelerating data growth.

The ZX-Series delivers performance using read- and write-optimized flash caches and parallel 1Gb/10GbE connectivity.

By connecting to Coraid EtherDrive SRX arrays via ATA over Ethernet for a scale-out architecture, the ZX-Series scales performance to multi-petabyte capacity across a shared pool. The performance and scale is complemented by data protection and features including triple-parity RAID, redundant array of independent nodes (RAIN), active-active clustering, unlimited snapshots, deduplication and compression.

“Our research confirms that scale-out storage designs built on Ethernet align well with the evolving architecture of the virtualized data center,” said Roger Cox, research VP at Gartner. “Functions such as hybrid storage pools, data deduplication and compression optimize storage utilization, thus reducing acquisition costs and improving TCO.”

ZX-Series features include:

• EtherDrive integration for multi-petabyte scalability and simplicity
• Real-time analysis and diagnosis of performance to monitor and enforce service levels
• Active-active cluster option for high availability
• Data compression and in-line deduplication to improve storage efficiency
• File-based snapshots, clones and replication for data protection
• Automated storage hierarchy with hybrid storage pools (HSPs) containing DRAM, flash cache and HDDs to optimize performance
• Seamless multiprotocol integration and secure data sharing between Microsoft Windows, Linux and Unix environments

The ZX-Series is available.

Should we purchase more storage? Obviously you would prefer not to, because tight IT budgets just don’t support a wholesale expansion in hard disk storage acquisitions.

Should we delete older data to free up storage space? Definitely not, because you will need that data to support data compliance requirements, also service level agreements. What if you delete data that ultimately prevents an organization from restoring data or a server from a VMware backup?

Can we look for a way to reduce redundant data? There you go! The fact is, there’s no reason why your company cannot gain control over ballooning data storage situations and reuse storage capacity you already have for some time before you’ll need to invest in any more. Powerful technologies for both file compression and data deduplication can cut storage repository requirements by as much as 90% in ideal circumstances, but even if you have a significant percentage of graphics files that don’t compress by a significant degree, your overall savings will still make data reduction efforts worth the exercise.

Digging into data deduplication and data compression

An increasing number of modern VMware backup solutions either build in data deduplication as part of the cost of the software or offer it for an extra cost. But with the trend toward building it in at no extra cost, there’s really no reason to pay for it anymore. Not all data deduplication techniques are born equal, however. While file-level deduplication eliminates exact copies of a file and it generally works very fast, it ranks as a lesser solution because it still leaves a huge amount of duplicate data on the table. Block-level deduplication can do an exceptionally good job of cutting disk space requirements, and, when integrated properly, doesn’t materially slow down the backup process.

Deduplication can be achieved in a number of ways, in-line deduplication being one of the most popular methods. It takes place before blocks are stored – looking for any blocks already stored so they don’t need to be stored again. Metadata tags point to the saved data for recovery purposes. While this approach may involve some overhead because hash calculations must be made on the fly for each disk block, its impact on user access to a production application will be unnoticed if it’s handled efficiently.

File compression is another powerful data reduction utility. While compression shrinks data volumes by stripping out data that doesn’t get in the way of achieving a complete restore, it does require some CPU overhead both on the backup side and when you recover. Basically, the more you compress a file, the longer it takes to recover. Usually, though, you can easily modify file compression levels to arrive at a happy medium that allows you to meet your SLA requirements handily.

The G-Cloud Framework Agreement will allow EMC to supply a wide range of specialist cloud services across the whole of the UK public sector through ‘Lot 4’ of the G-Cloud programme. This award places EMC on the roster of companies validated by the Cabinet Office as strategic suppliers to the G-Cloud programme and provides the vehicle through which EMC can play a major role in supporting the UK Government’s drive to transform public sector IT and delivery of modern, efficient and effective services to the citizen.

Writing on the Government Digital Service website, Chris Chant, Programme Director for the G-Cloud project at the Cabinet Office, says: “The change we are already making is a big one. It will affect the way government buys IT, who we buy it from, how we handle security, how we focus relentlessly on our customers and how all our employees work, not just those in IT. Every aspect of government and the public sector will be affected, thankfully, things will never be the same.”

Mark Gorman, Director, Public Sector for EMC in the United Kingdom, said: “We’re thrilled to have been chosen as a specialist cloud services provider as part of the G-Cloud programme. The ambition to separate the issue of infrastructure from applications will empower the Government to roll out innovations more quickly, at cost and energy requirements an order of magnitude lower than in the past. We look forward to working with departmental CIOs as we come to terms with a new world of public sector IT service delivery and a new model of supplier engagement – and together setting a new pace of innovation and project fulfilment.”

James Petter, Vice President and Managing Director of EMC in the United Kingdom and Ireland, commented: “Cloud innovation is vital to driving efficiencies in Government IT, but it also represents a dramatic transformation in the way Government services could be delivered. The UK G-Cloud agenda paves the way for a seismic shift in the way citizens and businesses interact with Government, as the foundation of a new era of big, open data.”

Under the initial G-Cloud programme, a range of Compute-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service products at differing security levels will be available from the Government’s CloudStore, which launched this week. This represents a key milestone in the implementation of modern cloud services through the G-Cloud programme, which is a major component of the UK Government’s drive to deliver a more competitive marketplace designed to transform delivery of IT services into a flexible, efficient and scalable utility.

About EMC

Peter Lee, Managing Director of Systems Evolution said “I am delighted that Janet, with her extensive knowledge and experience of Oracle and SQL environments is on board to develop and promote our Big Data team.

“We are keen to build on the extensive service we offer to reflect the advances in data management.  Janet’s support will help us realise our plans and also enable our experienced team to continue to focus fully on the needs of our clients.”

With the advent of Big Data and data analytics Janet’s previous work within the enterprise sector gives Janet a greater understanding of the hurdles and solutions available.

To contact Janet email janet@systemsevo.com or telephone 0844 504 2800.

To contact Sytems Evolution for any press enquiries email media@systemsevo.com

Nearly 90 VMware Service Providers now deliver VMware vCloud® Powered Services Based on VMware vSphere®, VMware vCloud Director™ and the vCloud API

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 7, 2012 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today introduced VMware vCloud® Integration Manager™, a new solution designed to help service providers automate the delivery and operations of VMware vCloud Director™ -based clouds. VMware also announced that nearly 90 service provider partners now offer services that have met VMware criteria as VMware vCloud Powered, an almost 3x increase since Q3 2011.

“Service providers are looking to get high-margin cloud services to market as quickly as possible,” said Mathew Lodge, senior director of cloud services, VMware. “Until now that involved wrangling manual processes, diverting scarce development resources onto writing glue code and portals, or choosing to implement complex and expensive third-party systems. With VMware vCloud® Integration Manager™, providers of VMware vCloud services will have the tools they need to automatically provision services, enable reseller partners and speed customer on-boarding.”

VMware vCloud Integration Manager software will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings, operate at maximum efficiency and scale to meet customer demand in a reliable, repeatable and cost-effective manner. VMware vCloud Integration Manager will help service providers:

• Accelerate time to revenue: vCloud Integration Manager will be tightly integrated with VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere®, VMware vShield™ Edge and VMware vCenter™ Chargeback Manager to automate and accelerate the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services. vCloud Integration Manager will provide a REST-based API to integrate with a service provider’s back office systems (CRM, billing, etc.), and a Web-based administration portal.
• Simplify operations to increase efficiency and reduce costs:vCloud Integration Manager will include Web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management. With the click of a button, service providers will be able to standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transacting with resellers.

VMware vCloud Powered Program Gains Traction
Almost 90 service providers have launched vCloud Powered services since VMware introduced the program in February 2011. The VMware vCloud Powered program requires VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) partners to offer services based on VMware vSphere and vCloud Director while exposing the vCloud API and supporting the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). Compliance with these requirements helps ensure that VMware vCloud Powered services offer customers on-demand access to virtual infrastructure from a public cloud, a secure and robust platform, and application and API portability between their internal datacenters and the VMware vCloud Powered services of their choice.

Providers of VMware vCloud Powered services are based in the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, catering to a variety of use cases ranging from compute resources for pre-production environments to seasonal and transient workloads to disaster recovery in the cloud.

About VMware
VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs. With 2011 revenues of $3.77 billion, VMware has more than 300,000 customers and 25,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VFCache combined with VMAX , VMAXe , VNX and VNXe storage delivers turbocharged performance with the protection (high availability, data integrity, reliability, and disaster recovery) for which EMC storage is trusted around the world. While VFCache is the next evolutionary step of EMC’s Flash strategy—requiring no disruption to customers’ existing storage architectures—it delivers revolutionary benefits.

VFCache is the latest in a line of enterprise Flash innovation firsts, beginning in 2008 when EMC was the first to integrate Flash drives into an enterprise storage array. Putting Flash drives into the storage array achieved an order of magnitude better performance—300X faster data access than 15K HDD.   Now, placing Flash technology in the server on a PCIe card can accelerate performance up-to another order of magnitude—4000X faster data access than 15K HDD.

Coming in the next year, EMC will add deduplication technology to VFCache, enabling customers to achieve even more efficiency from Flash technology. Additional Flash capacity and form factors will also be supported. VFCache will also more deeply integrate with EMC storage management technologies, and additional integration with FAST architecture. EMC’s vision for VFCache is delivering the industry’s most comprehensive, efficient and intelligent I/O path from the application to the data store. The result will be a networked infrastructure that is dynamically optimized for performance, intelligence, and protection for both physical and virtual environments.

EMC VFCache Technology Benefits

• Turbocharged Performance: VFCache is the fastest PCIe server Flash caching solution available today. VFCache resides in the server, eliminating the need for hot data to travel through the network to the storage array—boosting throughput performance in some cases up-to 3X and reducing latency by 60%. EMC is offering the industry’s best architecture—the PCIe Flash cards deliver better throughput and response, while using four times less CPU and memory resources than competing solutions.
• Automated Intelligence: VFCache is enabling a new tier of high performance storage in the server. VFCache extends the EMC FAST architecture to facilitate an intelligent end-to-end data tiering and caching strategy from the storage to the server. EMC ‘s focus on enabling customers to exploit the cost and performance benefits of FAST technology has catapulted EMC ‘s leadership in enterprise Flash ( see related announcement ).
• Enterprise-Class Protection: VFCache enables customers to benefit from total protection with “write-through caching” to the storage array. When data is written to VMAX, VMAXe, VNX or VNXe storage, customers have the confidence of knowing data is protected by the industry’s highest availability storage with data integrity, data reliability and disaster recovery. The information remains shareable and scalable—without any stranded storage.

EMC also plans an early customer access program for “Project Thunder” in the second quarter of 2012. “Project Thunder,” optimized for high-frequency, low-latency read/write workloads, will build upon the advanced PCIe technology delivered in VFCache to leverage the power of Flash through a dedicated server networked Flash-based appliance.

Customer Quotes:

Frank W. Smith, Senior IT Infrastructure Manager, PPG Industries.
“PPG Industries manufactures coatings and specialty products for the construction, consumer products, industrial and transportation markets. Putting Flash in the server was an easy decision for us. We know that the closer data on Flash is to an application, the better it will perform. However, we need more than just crazy fast I/O. Our data is the lifeblood of our operations, so we require a solution we can count on to protect our mission critical data while adding performance .  That is why we chose EMC VFCache for our Oracle environment, which complements our Symmetrix VMAX storage running FAST VP. With EMC , we get performance with protection—crazy fast I/O coupled with EMC ‘s trusted networked storage. There is no other solution on the market today that comes close to offering VFCache’s comprehensive performance, intelligence, and protection.”

Craig VanHuss, IS Manager, Enterprise Systems, Crutchfield Corp
“Crutchfield Corporation is a leading catalog and Internet retailer of consumer electronics products. We’ve been impressed with the performance and efficiency benefits of Flash drives and FAST Suite in our Microsoft SQL database environment, responsible for hosting www.crutchfield.com . After being introduced to EMC VFCache, we started thinking about the performance benefits of having data on Flash drives that are even closer to our SQL application—the closer to the application, the better it will perform. The potential performance benefits got us really excited. Deploying VFCache together with our Flash-enabled VNX running SQL would enable Crutchfield to protect our mission critical data while adding insanely fast performance.”

Brian Carpenter, Vice President of Information Technology, Heritage Auctions
“Heritage Auctions ( HA.com ) is the largest collectibles auctioneer, and third largest auction house in the world. All of our data resides on EMC storage, which is the backbone of our mission critical Microsoft SQL Server environment. Using Symmetrix VMAXe with FAST VP enables us to leverage Flash drives to increase performance for faster response time to bidders. VFCache means we can extend the intelligence of FAST into the server—providing unparalleled response to our bidders.”

Industry Analyst Quote:

Dave Vellante, Chief Analyst, Wikibon.org
” EMC landed a haymaker in 2008 when it introduced Flash into Symmetrix VMAX arrays and set the precedent for maximizing Flash technology in storage arrays. In 2012 we’re seeing the extension of the storage hierarchy where flash is being managed from the server all the way through to the spinning disk array. An important development is software that intelligently places data at the most appropriate location in this emerging storage hierarchy. Combined with FAST, EMC VFCache is a leading example of this trend coming to market as a solution.”

EMC Executive Quote:

Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Office, EMC Information Infrastructure Products
“EMC identified very early on that Flash technology would change the industry forever, and became the first to bring Flash to enterprise storage. With today’s announcement, EMC also becomes the first to implement PCIe Flash in a way that ensures mission critical applications reach new levels of performance, at the right cost, and with the level of protection and intelligence that customers demand.”

Technology Partner Quotes:

Jason Nolet, Vice President, Data Center and Enterprise Networking , Brocade
“EMC and Brocade have a long-standing relationship in the delivery of high-performance, highly resilient data center solutions. The deployment of EMC VFCache and FAST storage tiering technology will better enable customers to gain the businesses efficiencies of Flash with the confidence that their data is fully protected throughout its information lifecycle. Brocade fabric-based networks, which feature industry-leading performance and built-in resiliency, are a natural connectivity choice for EMCs new offering.”

Satinder Sethi, Vice President, Data Center Solutions, Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group, Cisco
“EMC VFCache extends the benefits of Flash storage into the computing system to dramatically improve application performance. VFCache complements the high density of the Cisco UCS platform to deliver higher performance computing needed in a virtualized data center environment and to support big data and business analytics applications.”

Eugene Saburi, General Manager, SQL Server Product Marketing, Microsoft Corporation
‘SQL Server customers who are looking to increase caching and storage performance can now take advantage of recent innovations in enterprise Flash technology. By extending PCIe flash caching technology to the server with VFCache—and putting data even closer the application—EMC is aiming to supercharge performance. EMC VFCache with SQL Server has the potential to boost caching and storage performance, while maintaining enterprise-class data protection.’

Raghu Raghuram, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure and Management, VMware
“Our customers are focused on simplifying management for the cloud. With VFCache EMC is extending its expertise in information management and exploiting the benefits of Flash directly to the server—whether in a physical or virtual environment. VFCache coupled with VMware cloud infrastructure and EMC storage can deliver heightened levels of performance with data protection, easing our customers’ journey to transform their IT infrastructures.”

Channel Partner Quotes:

Jamie Shepard, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions, International Computerware, Inc
“VFCache is a brilliant addition to EMC’s already comprehensive, Flash-optimized portfolio. VFCache will deliver a performance boost unmatched in the industry today—and with the protection our customers have come to expect from EMC storage. This new solution will change application performance as we know it today.”

Keith Norbie, Vice President, Nexus
“VFCache allows Nexus to provide our clients with a unique performance AND protection blend—while leveraging the benefits of EMC’s Flash optimized storage arrays. What our clients will gain in performance and protection is complemented with the intelligence of EMC’s unique automated storage tiering technology through EMC FAST. VFCache will help us satisfy the performance boost requirements, protection needs and automated intelligence for our customers with mission critical, hybrid cloud environments.”

As the amount of unstructured data in the enterprise grows, companies require an efficient and scalable storage system to help them manage growth, and a powerful analytics tool to derive valuable information from this data. EMC Isilon scale-out NAS with native HDFS provides Hadoop users with built-in access to a shared storage infrastructure thereby bridging the gap between the innovative powers of Big Data Hadoop and mission critical enterprise IT analytics.

EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, now integrated with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) protocol, provides customers with a solution for accelerating enterprise-wide deployment of Apache-based Hadoop. Up to now, early adopters of Hadoop have relied on makeshift storage infrastructures not optimized for Big Data exploration, inhibiting the shared data access critical to robust analysis, and preventing wide adoption of Hadoop in the enterprise. EMC Isilon, with native HDFS, removes the integration complexities of disparate open source components and hardware, and offers a comprehensive, enterprise-ready storage solution to protect, manage, and share data in a Hadoop environment.

EMC Isilon is the first and only scale-out NAS storage platform that integrates native HDFS as a protocol, providing all Hadoop users with built-in access to enterprise data protection , industry leading storage efficiency and accelerated data movement over a wide array of industry standard protocols (NFS, CIFS, FTP, HTTP). Isilon’s integration of HDFS also eliminates the single point of failure inherent with traditional open-source Apache Hadoop. This integration lets customers use the Apache-based Hadoop distribution of their choice and allows them to expand and increase their adoption of Hadoop in enterprise-wide deployments.

EMC builds on its innovation in data storage and analytics to deliver the only end-to-end Hadoop solution, offering enterprises planning, deployment, training and certification, and customer support services to assist customers moving to Hadoop environments. EMC Global Services Big Data Advisory Service helps customers identify business opportunity and build a comprehensive roadmap to apply Big Data to their enterprises. EMC services professionals can configure and integrate EMC Greenplum and EMC Isilon platforms into users’ environments, accelerating time to value and reducing risk. EMC Data Science and Big Data Analytics “open” training and certification builds customers’ IT staff data analytics knowledge and skills with a particular focus on opportunities and challenges presented by Big Data.

By combining the scalability and simplicity of Isilon scale-out NAS storage with the leading-edge analytics tools of Greenplum HD, EMC delivers the first and only end-to-end Hadoop solution in the industry that is ready for deployment in business critical enterprise IT environments.

Alex Younts, assistant engineer, Purdue University
“We tested EMC Isilon with our statistics department, which must often analyze huge data sets. EMC Isilon’s multi-protocol capabilities provided fast and reliable delivery of data to our statisticians, demonstrating the potential to increase the time spent on actually doing the science, while reducing management costs.”

Benjamin Woo, program vice president of worldwide storage systems, IDC
” IDC predicts that in 2012 enterprises will accelerate Hadoop adoption and deployment. Hadoop is becoming a viable competitor to existing storage systems for Big Data analytics, but fear can  stand in the way.   An investment by an industry leader like EMC casts a vote of confidence for Hadoop environments and makes the technology much more palatable.  EMC’s comprehensive Hadoop solution brings enterprises one step closer to unlocking the enormous value currently hidden within their volumes of Big Data.”

Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, EMC Isilon
“Hadoop will be a game-changer in unstructured data analytics once enterprise customers are convinced that adoption can simplify their infrastructure and architecture without compromising data security or management capabilities. We’ve taken the guesswork out of Hadoop deployment by bringing together the strengths of Isilon’s enterprise scale-out NAS storage systems with the Hadoop ecosystem. With EMC Isilon, enterprises now have the type of archiving, replication and management capabilities their businesses rely on combined with the innovative analytics of EMC Greenplum and the training, services and support of EMC to make the most of their Hadoop deployments. ”

Luke Lonergan, chief technology officer, Greenplum, a division of EMC
“Companies are recognizing the need to co-process both structured and unstructured data. As a part of the EMC Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform (UAP), the integrated Isilon solution enables customers to plug Hadoop-derived insight directly into a structured data analytics workflow without moving the data. This improves collaboration and speeds data analytics for our customers, enabling them to uncover new insights quickly and efficiently to maintain their competitive edge.”

PALO ALTO, Calif. — (Jan. 25, 2012) – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today unveiled the VMware Solution Exchange, an online virtualization and cloud solutions marketplace where customers, partners and developers can converge to help simplify the process of evaluating and selecting business solutions through a centralized, self-service portal.

A New Way to Find Solutions for the Private and Public Cloud

• VMware has a robust community of more than 2,000 technology partners who have built more than 3,500 applications and 6,000 infrastructure products that are compatible with VMware’s portfolio of products.
• The VMware Solution Exchange offers partners and developers who complement, integrate or interoperate with VMware’s portfolio of products a one-stop location to market and sell their solutions to potential customers.
• The proliferation of social media tools has evolved the way many people use the Internet to search, share and discover information, with user-generated feedback and community engagement playing an important role.
  • The VMware Solution Exchange looks to provide this familiar experience, by empowering customers to utilize search tools, explore rich multimedia content, and directly engage with partners and developers to help ease the process of finding the right solution for their businesses.

Additional VMware Solution Exchange features include:

• Partners and developers can feature their solutions and supplement their listings with rich multimedia content, including the ability to embed YouTube videos, provide product overviews, select technology categories, downloadable trial software, screenshots of their products, downloadable whitepapers, architecture blueprints and other marketing collateral.
• Each partner and developer will be able to provide an overview of their solution, with VMware and third party software version compatibility, VMware certification details, including their VMware Ready logo and contact information.
• Customers of all sizes, from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), to enterprise buyers, will be able to discover new solutions and directly engage with partners and developers with inquiries for licenses, trials, support and sales requests.
• In addition, the VMware Solution Exchange provides customers with the opportunity to use a five-star rating system and provide a written review about their experience with the solution. They can also vote on a particular version of a partner’s solution.

User interface

The home page of the VMware Solution Exchange showcases featured and popular listings from VMware partners and developers.
Solutions from partners and developers are categorized by technology type and industry type, along with the VMware product with which they are compatible or integrated with.

Executive Quote

Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware
“With the VMware Solution Exchange, we are offering our robust partner network a new and centralized marketplace to promote their solutions and directly connect with customers to help expedite the sales process. For customers, our goal is to empower them to quickly and easily find the resources they need to make purchasing decisions to accelerate their journey to the cloud, while also helping our technology partners deliver and manage joint solutions in a single, self-service location.”

“As a VMware partner, generating awareness of our solutions is a key component to our success. The VMware Solution Exchange presents us with a centralized portal to market, provide information, and allow users to download our joint solutions – all from one location. This is a very simple, but highly valuable tool for our organization.”

Joyce Mullen, vice president, Global Alliances, Dell

“Researching joint solutions in the industry can be cumbersome and time-consuming as information is often scattered across multiple sites. By sharing resources and engaging directly with customers on the VMware Solution Exchange, we look forward to helping organizations speed evaluation and deployment of their joint Dell and VMware solutions.”

Peter McKay, chief executive officer, Desktone

“With cloud adoption on the rise among enterprises, service providers are looking to leverage innovative, efficient and cost-effective virtualization solutions to meet end user demand for flexible and affordable IT management. VMware Solution Exchange makes it convenient for service providers to explore and evaluate leading cloud and virtualization solutions such as the Desktone / VMware desktops as a service (DaaS) offering. We’re proud to partner with VMware to deliver joint solutions that are revolutionizing the enterprise desktop.”

Vineet Jain, chief executive officer, Egnyte

“As both a partner and technology solution, VMware is one of our key providers in implementing the Egnyte HybridCloud File Sharing solution in the enterprise. With the creation of the VMware Solution Exchange, new and existing customers alike have easy access to Egnyte’s solutions, with the added benefit of access to other, complementary services that will allow them to address the unique problems of their given industry and company.”

Chad Sakac, vice president, VMware Technology Alliance, EMC

“EMC is pleased to join the VMware Solution Exchange, which will help us connect directly with customers seeking to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. By having all of our offerings in a centralized location, we look forward to the VMware Solution Exchange providing EMC and VMware with an easy way to help customers accelerate every step of their journey to cloud computing.”

Shaun Walsh, vice president, Marketing, Emulex

“As a longstanding VMware partner, we have worked closely to ensure our broad range of I/O connectivity solutions and management software are tightly integrated into the VMware solution set, so we see strong value in the new VMware Solution Exchange in enabling customers and partners the ability to collaborate and develop new, innovative, interoperable solutions together. For Emulex, the VMware Solution Exchange allows our joint customers to develop their ideal converged, virtualized solution leveraging our 10Gb Ethernet and Fibre Channel adapters as well as our OneCommand™ Manager solution along with complementary partner technology for a high-performance VMware-based solution.”

Phil de la Motte, Business Development Director, Infrastructure Alliances, F5

“The VMware Solution Exchange is an effective tool to help customers search out and find integrated partner solutions that meet their unique and specific challenges. This single system benefits both vendors and customers. F5 is able to enter all information about our solutions that are tightly integrated with VMware products. In turn, prospective customers can use the system’s powerful search capabilities to quickly find solutions that are most relevant to their needs. The VMware Solution Exchange also enables them to reach out to and engage with VMware experts, partners and developers.”

Rich Boberg, general manager, Virtualization Solutions, Fusion-io

“As the leader in virtualization, VMware’s new VMware Solution Exchange can help IT leaders discover powerful solutions that deliver on VMware’s high standards for compatibility and reliability. The VMware Solution Exchange will help both Fusion-io customers and channel partners leverage the power of the entire virtualization ecosystem through solutions like Fusion’s ioDrive and ioTurbine software, which provide powerful low latency performance to help virtualize even data intensive applications and meet the needs of demanding virtualized environments.”

Kevin Dickson, vice president, Product Management, Infoblox

“Today’s dynamic virtual environments require a whole new approach to network infrastructure related services, such as automated assignment and management of IP addresses for virtual machines. For exactly this purpose, Infoblox offers its vCO IPAM Plug-in for VMware. With this plug-in, we’re especially pleased to be among the first participants in the VMware Solution Exchange so enterprise IT teams have at their fingertips one of the key tools they need to accelerate their virtualization and cloud deployments.”

Paul Rolfe, vice president, Strategic Alliances, McAfee

“McAfee applauds VMware in the launch of the VMware Solution Exchange. We look forward to working with VMware to showcase our comprehensive virtualization security solutions to VMware’s customer and partner community in this new online, self-service virtualization marketplace.”

Stephen Beamish, vice president, Corporate Marketing & Business Development, Mitel

“As the world leader in virtualization, we’re very pleased to count VMware as a strategic partner. Virtualization is a critical market for Mitel, as it is transforming the unified communications industry as businesses recognize the benefits of treating voice as an application. VMware’s Solution Exchange is the ideal venue for customers and channel partners to learn about how unified communications can be delivered as a virtual appliance, as well as the enormous role unified communications will play in the growth of desktop virtualization.”

Chris Cummings, vice president, Products and Solutions Marketing, NetApp

“Both large and midsized organizations are looking for innovative ways to keep pace with growing business demands and do more with fewer resources. Cloud and virtualization – whether it be desktop, business or core applications – offer the flexibility and efficiency they need to expand and adapt as needed. The VMware Virtualization Solution Exchange is a great self-service marketplace that enables customers to find the right integrated NetApp and VMware solutions to fit their evolving requirements and propel their business forward.”

Gilad Zlotkin, vice president, Virtualization and Management Products R&D, Radware

“The VMware Solution Exchange provides Radware with an industry-leading virtualization exchange for reaching out to the VMware community to share information and best practices about our joint solutions. Radware vDirect™ for VMware vCenter Orchestrator provides greater IT efficiency and saves costs by automating the delivery of application delivery and load balancing services to virtualized applications as part of the vCO workflows. What’s more, Radware vDirect™ for VMware vCloud Director enhances VMware vCD’s tiered services model by incorporating virtual application delivery controllers and enabling tiered services with guaranteed SLAs per tenant and application. The VMware Solution Exchange provides a premier forum for engaging with VMware partners, developers, customers and prospects to identify the best application delivery controller and virtualization technology solutions that meet their needs.”

Venugopal Pai, vice president, Global Alliances, Riverbed Technology

“Businesses all over the world are turning to Riverbed’s IT performance solutions and VMware’s virtualization solutions to accelerate IT and improve productivity while cutting costs. The VMware Solution Exchange provides a marketplace for customers to learn about our joint solutions and how we are working together to enable enterprises to successfully and intelligently implement strategic initiatives such as virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing and disaster recovery, without fear of compromising performance.”

Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer, ShoreTel

“ShoreTel support for VMware extends beyond the core IP PBX UC, and now includes the Contact Center as well so customers can leverage their VMware environment even more broadly. The inherent brilliant simplicity within the ShoreTel solution is further enhanced by the additional reliability and scalability benefits of a VMware platform.”

Partha Panda, vice president, Business Development, Trend Micro

“The VMware Solution Exchange provides Trend with a very innovative virtualization exchange for reaching out to the VMware community to share information and best practices about our comprehensive suite of next-generation virtualization security solutions. These solutions leverage VMware infrastructure to deliver better-than-physical security, giving VMware customers the confidence to accelerate and complete their virtualization journey, maximize consolidation rates and cost savings and ensure compliance.”

Todd Pavone, executive vice president, Products and Solutions, VCE

“VMware is a key component of Vblock Infrastructure Platforms and the VMware Solution Exchange is an ideal way to promote the many converged infrastructure solutions we’ve jointly developed. This will make it easier for our customers and partners to deploy cloud and virtualization solutions that simplify their IT environments, reduce costs and improve time to market.”

Maryam Alexandrian, senior vice president, Worldwide Sales and Channels, Wyse

“With the launch of the VMware Solution Exchange, Wyse is pleased to have a new online virtualization marketplace for our joint customers and partners to simply and easily evaluate and select business solutions that best fit their needs. We see this resource as an excellent tool to engage & help our joint customers and we look forward to growing our business with VMware.”