VMware forum highlights the future of computing

VMWARE recently held its annual virtualisation forum, an event that encompassed vendor displays, new product announcements, a round table discussion, as well as an in-country follow-up to VMWorld, held in Las Vegas in September. Close to 700 of VMware`s partners and customers attended the forum, making this the biggest end-user event the company has hosted in South Africa.

Lewis Gee, VMware vice-president of field operations in the EMEA region, said: "With so many companies now evangelising virtualisation, we are remaining clear about what it is that we do," explains Gee. "We are focusing on three areas - data centre, desktops, and cloud computing -  because we believe that virtualisation, and therefore VMware, has an important role to play in these areas."

In keeping with these areas of focus, two announcements were made at the event. VMware introduced its virtual data centre operating system, an expansion of its suite of virtual infrastructure. "The virtual data centre OS allows businesses to efficiently pool all types of hardware and resources - servers, storage and network - into an aggregated on-premise cloud, and when needed, safely federate workloads to external clouds for additional computing capacity," said , regional manager for VMware Southern Africa.

The vCloud initiative for enterprise-class cloud computing was also introduced. It will deliver enterprise-class cloud computing by federating computing capacity between virtual data centres and cloud service providers to support existing and new application loads.

In a round table discussion held at the event, Gee and Norton were joined by , CIO of ; Derek Paton, business development manager at ; and , technology architect at Aptronics.

Norton pointed out that virtualisation is not a new technology, but it has now evolved from a mainframe/UNIX-type of environment to one that can run on the bare metal of any machine. He added that because we are a consumer-centric society, people always want bigger, better, faster, and are looking for the next big thing, and this is one of the reasons virtualisation is becoming increasingly popular - it improves speed and efficiency in computing.

The panel also delved into the future of cloud computing. "I believe that the applications and services the cloud will deliver will be unique to each company and each service provider," said Norton. "This will lead to a massive explosion in data centre hosting." Paton added:  "We are at a major transitionary point in the IT world. As we see infrastructure being consolidated and new ways of being able to move data around, we will increasingly move down this path."



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