While most technology vendors have been socked with double-digit declines in
sales during the ongoing economic recession, virtualization technologies have
been named by many VARs and vendors as something that's been immune to budget
cuts.
That's because virtualization is widely viewed as fulfilling this recession's
mantra: "Do more with less."
And judging by the interest of vendors in VMware's VMworld event held this week
from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 at the Moscone
Center in San
Francisco, virtualization technology remains a strong
bet for any VAR or vendor looking to beat
the odds during this recession. VMware and several other vendors have piled on
with technology and partnership announcements at the show.
VMware introduced its vCenter product family, which provides policy-based,
service-driven management, building on VMware vSphere 4. VMware says the
product family reduces operating costs, simplifies management, and enables
delivery of more dynamic and flexible IT services. Sold a la carte, the vCenter
family includes four Infrastructure Management technologies and two Service
Delivery Management technologies.
VMware also announced
VMware
Go, a free service to help first-time customers get started with
virtualization by automating the installation and configuration of VMware's
free ESXi hypervisor.
EMC announced that it is expanding its business and
technology alliance with VMware to help customers with private cloud computing
and enabling Tier 1 applications on VMware vSphere 4, as well as streamlining
configuration and compliance management and automating IT processes using
VMware vCenter and EMC Ionix.
VMware rival Citrix
Systems and Xen.org are using the first day of the VMworld event to
roll out a strategy for a new open-source cloud computing platform based on the
Xen virtualization hypervisor.
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