VMware's vSphere Is Here
Nobody gives the "shift" key a better workout than VMware. This week, the virtualization market leader drove journalists and bloggers a few strokes closer to carpal tunnel syndrome with the unveiling of vSphere.
To be specific, it's vSphere 4 that VMware is talking about this week. You might remember it as VMware Infrastructure, its former name. It's basically the company's platform for the datacenter, or, as one VMware executive says in Keith Ward's excellent story on vSphere, "We're calling vSphere a cloud operating system."
There are a lot of those floating around these days, of course. But the experts in Keith's story say that VMware remains way ahead of everybody else in this game, and we're more than willing to defer to them on this topic. It seems as though VMware has beefed up features significantly and has expanded its tiered pricing model so that vSphere is more affordable on the low end.
The VMware folks say that they want to let companies build private clouds that will connect with public clouds (and with all these clouds around, no wonder Sun is disappearing -- heh heh). The idea is that everything will be virtual and services-based rather than application-based. That makes sense to us...we think. Exactly what should go into which cloud seems to be the question that IT professionals will have to answer. Partners should help them answer it (for a reasonable consulting fee, of course).
And that's where we'll leave the discussion of vSphere, because your editor's hands are starting to cramp from all this shifting.
What's your take on vSphere, cloud computing, private clouds and public clouds? Do you have this stuff figured out? Are you selling or using anything like this now? If so, explain everything to us at lpender@rcpmag.com.
Posted by Lee Pender on April 22, 2009 at 11:55 AM