More clouds are rolling into cloud computing as virtualization provider VMware announced Tuesday its vSphere 4, described as “the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud.”
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said vSphere 4 “brings cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, nondisruptive way.” Computing clouds internal to an enterprise, the company added, can simplify delivery, decrease costs by up to 30 percent, increase flexibility, and allow for a more rapid response to changing needs.
The company also announced new services in its VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, including a beta release of VMware VAM App on Demand, which allows for free software evaluation via the cloud.
‘Holistically Manage’
VMware said vSphere 4 will allow IT departments to “holistically manage” infrastructure components, including processors, storage and networking, as one seamless operating environment. Hosting providers will be able to use vSphere 4 to deliver cloud-computing services more efficiently, according to the company, which added that it’s working to support a “dynamic federation” between external and internal clouds.
The company said the new product extends VMware Infrastructure 3 by delivering the efficiency and performance needed for large-scale environments, enabling new levels of control over application service levels and allowing the customer a greater choice of hardware, application architecture, on- or off-premise hosting, and other components.
The increased efficiency could offer as much as a 50 percent storage savings and up to a 20 percent savings on power and cooling. As an illustration, the company said the storage savings, if accumulated across all vSphere customers, could save up to 50 times the number of pictures now on Facebook, and the power savings across its customers could provide the power required by all of Denmark for 10 days.
vSphere 4 is also being touted for its ability to deliver more powerful virtual machines, in terms of number of virtual processors…