Source: VMware, Inc.

VMware Extends Unified Hybrid Cloud Platform, Empowers Customers to Innovate Faster

New Public Cloud Services and Software-Defined Data Center Solutions Enable Organizations to Securely Build, Run and Deliver Any Application

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - August 31, 2015) - Today at VMworld® 2015, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) announced new innovations for the company's unified hybrid cloud platform. These new public cloud services and software-defined solutions will enable customers to build applications faster, improve IT security, rapidly recover from disasters and drive meaningful business value.

"Digital business transformation is creating new opportunities and new risks across every industry," said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president and general manager, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware. "Applications are the fuel of this digital business transformation. With our One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device™ strategy and our unified hybrid cloud platform, VMware is empowering the next wave of industry leaders to deliver applications with the stability, security and reliability of an enterprise, while allowing organizations to innovate with the agility of a startup."

VMware's unified hybrid cloud platform enables customers to create one consistent environment based on VMware vSphere® across the private and public cloud to securely build, run and deliver any traditional or cloud-native application. VMware's unified hybrid cloud platform is built on a software-defined data center architecture, and offers customers openness and choice in how to build and manage applications and cloud environments based on their needs.

VMware's Expanding Portfolio of Public Cloud Services
VMware vCloud® Air™, the public cloud component of VMware's unified platform, allows the data center and cloud to remain connected so that all resources are accessible and shared across the hybrid cloud. VMware vCloud Air streamlines the digital processes required to realize the value of applications while maintaining the security and performance organizations demand. New or expanded vCloud Air services include:

  • VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery Services - VMware offers a unique approach to cloud disaster recovery, which includes a single cloud-based orchestration console and cloud services that deliver unified protection of all resources on-premises and off-premises. Key new enhancements to be delivered include:
    • Disaster Recovery OnDemand™: VMware will add a pay-for-what-you-consume pricing option to VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. Customers will pay a flat fee for each VM protected and the amount of storage consumed by the VMs. When a DR test is run or a DR event occurs, customers will only pay for the compute consumed when VMs are running.
    • Site Recovery Manager Air™: Site Recovery Manager Air is a software as a service offering that will provide VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery customers with a comprehensive management solution for designing, testing, executing and orchestrating centralized business continuity and disaster recovery plans. VMware Site Recovery Manager Air will enable fast, reliable and orchestrated recovery of multi-VM applications and data centers protected in VMware vCloud Air.
  • VMware vCloud Air Object Storage - VMware vCloud Air Object Storage is a portfolio of highly scalable, reliable and cost effective storage services for unstructured data. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by Google Cloud Platform is based on Google Cloud Storage and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC is based on EMC ViPR, offered by EMC Cloud Services and integrated into vCloud Air OnDemand. VMware vCloud Air Object Storage will be easy to setup and exceptionally durable and available, and will reduce the need for data protection with built-in redundancy. It will support global access use cases with easy access from any device, anywhere, anytime.
  • VMware vCloud Air SQL - VMware vCloud Air SQL is a new database as a service offering that will provide easy access to scalable, cloud-hosted relational databases. Delivered in a cost-efficient pay-as-you-go model, and built on the trusted foundation of vSphere, vCloud Air SQL will support hybrid data solutions that seamlessly and securely extend on-premises databases to the cloud. VMware vCloud Air SQL will support Microsoft SQL Server, with a variety of memory, compute and storage options, and plans to support other relational databases in the future.

Read this blog to learn more about these new additions to VMware vCloud Air.

Software-Defined Data Center - The Foundation for a Unified Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Research indicates the software-defined data center is going mainstream, as customers move from virtualizing compute resources to implementing storage and network virtualization. A new report by Research and Markets notes that the software-defined data center market will hit $77.18 billion by the year 2020, which is up from the $21.78 billion it's expected to rake in for 2015.

VMware announced new product releases for the software-defined data center that include:

  • VMware NSX™ 6.2 - VMware NSX 6.2 enables organizations to achieve application continuity through disaster recovery and metro-pooling for more efficient use of resources throughout a single data center and across data centers. With VMware NSX, customers can reduce recovery time objectives by as much as 80 percent1. VMware NSX 6.2 also adds better integration with physical infrastructure, enabling simplified and consistent operations for the entire data center network and the extension of micro-segmentation to physical servers. Finally, new capabilities such as Traceflow and Central CLI further simplify operations and visibility. Read this blog to learn more about VMware NSX 6.2.
  • VMware vRealize™ Operations™ 6.1 - VMware vRealize Operations 6.1 will deliver a consistent management framework as organizations evolve from the private cloud and adopt technologies for the hybrid cloud. With the new Intelligent Workload Placement capability, VMware vRealize Operations will match the workload to a customer's specific IT and business needs, and recommend the best placement location. Proactive Rebalancing enables customers to continually meet those needs. Operating system and application monitoring will be available natively in VMware vRealize Operations and predictive analytics help IT proactively identify and avoid potential issues across infrastructure and application stacks from a unified self-learning management solution. For more information, read VMworld 2015: Intelligent Workload Management with vRealize Operations 6.1.
  • vRealize Log Insight™ 3 - New features in vRealize Log Insight 3 will include double the scale and performance to 15,000 messages per second, improvements in fault tolerance around clustering, analytics improvements with new charting options and query snapshots, improved integration with vRealize Operations, and improvements in Big Data style query execution.
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 - VMware Integrated OpenStack 2 will be based on OpenStack Kilo, making it current with upstream OpenStack code, and will include an industry-first seamless upgrade capability that will address one of the largest deployment and operational challenges for OpenStack clouds. VMware Integrated OpenStack will also include enhancements such as load-balancing as a service, Ceilometer and Heat Auto Scaling to make VMware-based OpenStack clouds more scalable, performant and resilient. VMware also announced VMware Integrated OpenStack will be available to service providers through the VMware vCloud Air Network program. Read this blog to learn more about VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.
  • VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 - VMware Site Recovery Manager 6.1 will integrate with VMware NSX 6.2, enabling IT to use network virtualization to simplify disaster recovery management and accelerate recovery in the software-defined data center. VMware Site Recovery Manager will orchestrate the live migration of VMs at scale between sites by automating cross-vCenter vMotion operations, enabling zero downtime disaster avoidance and data center migrations. VMware Site Recovery Manager will interoperate with VMware vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management to enable automatic, policy-based disaster protection for VMs. VMware Site Recovery Manager will now add support for stretched cluster solutions including EMC VPLEX, Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform and IBM San Volume Controller. Read this blog to learn more about Site Recovery Manager 6.1.
  • VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering - VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering will enable ecosystem partners including Asigra, EMC, Infinio, PrimaryIO, Samsung, SanDisk and StorageCraft to offer third party software-based data services such as replication and caching. These data services will be fully integrated in vSphere and managed through vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management, which is the same framework used to manage all the software-defined storage services in vSphere. Hear what our partners are saying about vSphere APIs for IO Filtering.

Technology Preview - Project Skyscraper
Today at VMworld 2015, VMware revealed a technology preview of Project Skyscraper, a new set of innovative hybrid cloud capabilities for vSphere. These new capabilities will enable customers to extend their data center to the public cloud and seamlessly operate across boundaries while providing enterprise-level security and business continuity. At VMworld, the company will demonstrate live workload migration through Cross-Cloud vMotion and Content Sync across a private cloud and vCloud Air. Read more about Project Skyscraper in this blog.

Analyst and Customer Commentary
"As a result of the success and comfort level IT organizations are having with software-defined data center strategies and the increasing simplicity of cloud solutions fueled by core virtualization, we are witnessing an IT infrastructure and information security sea-change taking place. VMware is one of the companies that is driving this IT transformation. VMware's strategy to combine a platform for achieving a unified hybrid cloud with business mobility solutions that enable organizations to extend secure access to applications and information to any device or user is resonating with customers, and increasingly making them a more strategic IT partner." - Mark Bowker, senior analyst at ESG

"The growth of virtualization and the mainstream adoption of the software defined data center has really enabled our IT strategy. It's all about delivering agility and flexibility and exploiting software defined technologies to tailor environments to meet our business challenges. Through VMware's unified hybrid cloud approach, we estimate the time it takes to deliver value through IT to the business has improved by close to 75 percent, with better security controls and in full compliance with Sarbanes Oxley and other regulations by which we are governed." - Bryan Thompson, executive vice president and CTO at Heartland Payment Systems

"Our developers need us to move fast. Our business needs us to be secure and compliant. Our management needs us to help drive revenue and capture market opportunities. With VMware we have access to a unified platform that spans both the public and private cloud to support this wide range of business requirements. The vRealize suite really is at the heart of it for us. With vRealize we get a robust set of management tools that can operate across our heterogeneous infrastructure to help us drive down inefficiency and cost. The NSX platform gives us a new model for securing our hybrid cloud environment. And vCloud Air will provide us with a simple and cost effective way to improve our approach to disaster recovery." - Michael Conroy, director, TechOps at Rent-A-Center

Pricing and Availability

  • VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by Google Cloud Platform is generally available.
  • VMware vCloud Air SQL is available now as part of an early access program.
  • VMware vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC is expected to be available as part of an early access program in Q3 2015.
  • VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery OnDemand and Site Recovery Manager Air are expected to be available as part of early access programs in Q4 2015.
  • VMware NSX 6.2 is generally available and can be purchased with either a perpetual or term license. List pricing for a perpetual license starts at USD $4,995 per CPU and list price for a term license starts at USD $34 per VM per month, with volume discounts available.
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack 2, Virtual SAN 6.1, vRealize Operations 6.1, vRealize Log Insight 3, Site Recovery Manager 6.1 and VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering are all expected to be generally available in Q3 2015.

Additional Resources

About VMware
VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility. Built on VMware's industry-leading virtualization technology, our solutions deliver a brave new model of IT that is fluid, instant and more secure. Customers can innovate faster by rapidly developing, automatically delivering and more safely consuming any application. With 2014 revenues of $6 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware, VMworld, "One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device," vSphere, vCloud, vCloud Air, Disaster Recovery OnDemand, vCenter, Site Recovery Manager, Site Recovery Manager Air, NSX, vRealize, vRealize Operations, Virtual SAN, and Log Insight are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding future unified hybrid cloud platform product features, the expected availability and features of VMware products and services comprising the platform, benefits to customers, the potential impact on and transformation of the industry and the projected size of the software-defined data center market in 2015 and 2020. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to (i) changes to priorities and spending allocations; (ii) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (iii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the enterprise software and cloud computing markets, and new product and marketing initiatives by our competitors; (v) our customers' ability to develop, and to transition to, new products and computing strategies such as cloud computing and software-defined data centers; (vi) the uncertainty of customer acceptance of emerging technology; (vii) rapid technological and market changes in virtualization software and application platforms for enterprise computing; (viii) changes to product development timelines; (ix) the successful interoperability and integration of the technologies involved; (x) VMware's ability to protect its proprietary technology; and (xi) VMware's ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees. These forward looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that we may file from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

1 Based on internal estimates

Contact Information:

Media Contacts

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VMware Global Communications
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