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Tech Data Teams Up With VMware To Deliver VMware vSphere 5

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Tech Data Corporation has announced that it has partnered with VMware to deliver VMware vSphere 5 to its channel of over 60,000 resellers in the United States.

VMware vSphere 5 is available for live, remote, or virtual demos at Tech Data’s onsite VMware Transformation Center, providing resellers with expert-led sales and technical training to differentiate and optimize their businesses through offering virtualization and cloud computing solutions based on VMware technologies.

“VMware vSphere® 5 presents an immediate opportunity for VMware partners to capitalize on the growing interest in cloud computing by building secure, private clouds for their customers”
“We are excited to add VMware vSphere® 5 to our virtualization offering in Tech Data’s Advance Infrastructure Systems (AIS) group,” said Amy Belcher, Vice President of Virtualization and Storage Product Marketing at Tech Data. “VMware vSphere 5 is one of the industry’s most complete platforms and will enable our resellers to provide their customers with an efficient, simplified virtualization opportunity. We are also pleased to offer the VMware Transformation Center as a resource for both our resellers and their customers to experience the latest technology from VMware and other leading IT vendors.”

The VMware vSphere 5 virtualization and cloud infrastructure platform creates increased efficiency through utilization and automation, lower capital and operating costs, and quick responses to business needs without sacrificing security or control. VMware vSphere 5 and the company’s cloud infrastructure suite are supported by more than 25,000 partners, including technology partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers, service providers, and systems integrators, as well as every major global hardware manufacturer, helping users effectively respond to the growing needs of their business and gain confidence in their IT transformation.

“VMware vSphere® 5 presents an immediate opportunity for VMware partners to capitalize on the growing interest in cloud computing by building secure, private clouds for their customers,” said Doug Smith, Vice President of Global Partner Strategy and Operations at VMware. “In the VMware Transformation Center, Tech Data is showing resellers how VMware technologies can deliver cloud computing solutions for existing data centers, helping to dramatically increase efficiencies and business agility.”

The VMware Transformation Center is housed in Tech Data’s onsite Solutions Center, offering resellers the opportunity to demonstrate products and services from over 120 manufacturers and software publishers. Located in Tech Data’s corporate headquarters in Clearwater, Fla., the Solutions Center features a 6,000 square-foot proof-of-concept IT solutions lab with over $5 million in IT products. Hosting over 300 visitors each month, the Solutions Center also offers technology seminars, hands-on training, and classroom instruction.

VMware product demonstrations currently available in Tech Data’s Solutions Center include VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter™ Server, VMware View™, Trend Micro Deep Security and VMware vShield™ Endpoint, Cisco Nexus 1000v Distributed Switch, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager™, VMware vCenter CapacityIQ™, VMware vCloud® Director, VMware vCenter Chargeback™ and VMware Zimbra®. Demonstration of the EMC VNXe series, an ideal fit for small- to medium-sized businesses, is also available through the Solutions Center. The EMC VNXe series serves as the virtual storage platform for VMware vSphere 5 and integrates with VMware vCenter Server.

VMware Announces Availability Of VMware vSphere 5

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VMware today announced the general availability of VMware vSphere 5, delivering nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities to help customers transform IT by driving greater efficiency from existing investments and improving operational agility.

The foundation of VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite, VMware vSphere 5, includes new features and enhancements to deliver better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications. It also introduces advanced automation capabilities to free IT from manual processes and allow it to be more responsive to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions — VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs. When combined with VMware vSphere 5’s enhanced High Availability, these gains in VM scalability and performance enable customers to virtualize any business-critical applications with confidence in the application’s continued performance and availability.

VMware vSphere 5 and the cloud infrastructure suite are supported by more than 25,000 partners, including technology partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers, service providers, and systems integrators, as well as every major global hardware manufacturer.

VMware vSphere 5 is currently available in packages and prices that address the widest range of customer requirements, starting at $83 per processor.

Virtustream Teams Up With VMware To Run SAP Applications On The xStream Enterprise Cloud Platform

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Virtustream, a provider of cloud services and infrastructure solutions, today announced a partnership with VMware to demonstrate the viability and efficiency of running SAP applications in a secure, multi-tenanted enterprise cloud environment.

Through a new program offered by Virtustream, qualified SAP customers can test drive running their SAP applications on Virtustream’s enterprise cloud platform, xStream, with resources optimized by VMware vSphere.

VMware Acquires Shavlik Technologies

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Virtualization software juggernaut VMware this morning announced that it has agreed to buy Shavlik Technologies, a provider of cloud-based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Financial terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed later this year, were not disclosed, but Mark Shavlik was ‘happy‘ to announce the agreement: “I want to thank all Shavlik employees past and present as well as our partners. Because of your hard work and dedication, we were able to build a great company…Our two companies have a long-term relationship built upon VMware GO™, our joint SaaS based IT Management solution. VMware GO assists SMBs with rapid deployment and management of VMware vSphere, the VMware Hypervisor and general IT management of both physical and virtual computers. VMware GO has attracted over 200,000 registered users creating more than 20,000 VMware Hypervisors and 120,000 Virtual machines. Shavlik and VMware share a vision of IT Management for now and the future. A vision of delivering solid, easy to use IT solutions to SMBs to enable customers to take full advantage of the efficiencies gained with the latest technologies. ”

Shavlik Technologies was founded in 1993 to offer a new approach to security application design and development that enabled us to take big steps in the simplification of computer security while at the same time creating a very trustworthy product. Since then, we have grown to help thousands of customers simplify their IT management.

Shavlik Technologies provides on-premise and SaaS-based management solutions that enable SMBs to manage, monitor and secure their IT environments when moving to virtual and cloud computing IT deployments.

Some view this acquisition as a way for VMware to ‘shield’ their customers from popular configuration management and deployment tools, such as Puppet, Opscode’s Chef, and even Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM).

According to VMware’s press release, Shavlik currently has more than 3,500 customers using their on premise IT management products.

Arkeia Software Releases Backup Agent For vSphere 4.1

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Arkeia Software, a provider of network backup solutions, today announced availability of Arkeia Network Backup v8.2 for VMware’s vSphere 4.1.

The Arkeia Network Backup Agent for vSphere 4.1 uses VMware’s latest vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP). The agent supports VMware’s Changed Block Tracking for fast incremental backups and both vCenter and vApp for flexible management of large vSphere deployments across multiple physical hosts. Learn more at www.arkeia.com/vstorage.

For a limited period, the Arkeia Virtual Appliance for VMware Essentials includes an Arkeia vStorage agent license for three VMware hosts. The standard package offers support for only one VMware host. This represents a discount of more than 60% over à la carte pricing.

The Arkeia Virtual Appliance is a preconfigured, ready-to-deploy backup server available for VMware ESX and ESXi.

This Arkeia Virtual Appliance package delivers a turn-key backup solution for a VMware Essential bundle (including 3 host servers) for less than $3,000.

VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2

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VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.

Enterprise infrastructure providers

Several large infrastructure providers announced their own vSphere based cloud offerings. AT&T, Verizon Business, SAVVIS and Terremark all announced similar offerings.

Software providers
Several software providers already support the vCloud API to automatically provision virtual appliances to vCloud-compatible service providers. This greatly facilitates software distribution. Several of these VM build services like CohesiveFT and rPath have announced support for vCloud.

More open source competition coming up

While VMware only spoke about Amazon EC2, another interesting development is the Xen Cloud Platform, an initiative of the Xen Project to enable completely open source cloud infrastructures. XCP was announced yesterday. The Xen project will build upon the work done by projects like the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula to create what basically is an open source equivalent of the vSphere / vCloud stack.

Citrix, a major contributor to the Xen Project and a major competitor of VMware, is expected to announce a commercial XCP offering soon.