EWeek provides details on VMware’s move to provide cloud computing virtualization tools.
New VMware CEO Paul Maritz is planning to bring the virtualization company deeper into the cloud by providing the tools to create a virtual, flexible IT infrastructure for the enterprise and for hosting providers.
VMware is positioning itself to provide a layer of virtualization technology needed to create a cloud computing infrastructure.
When newly minted CEO Paul Maritz spoke to analysts July 22 following the release of VMware's 2008 second-quarter financial results, he told the audience that the virtualization company is moving into a new stage of its development that would include a vigorous focus on creating virtual environments for cloud computing infrastructures.
The fact that VMware, which is still considered the leading vendor of x86 virtualization technology, is developing virtualization for the cloud should not come as a shock. Maritz himself oversaw EMC's cloud division before moving to VMware and former CEO Diane Greene had spoken of moving virtualization from a mere consolidation tool to a technology that would bring a new level of automation and systems management into the data center, which then leads to a cloud infrastructure.
Based on the following, we can look forward to VMware making announcements on cloud computing (like Amazon Web Services) hosters supporting VMware’s new tools.
Cloud computing holds the promise of allowing enterprises to save money and resources by offloading some or all of their IT infrastructure to vendors that provide applications or software infrastructures that are delivered through the Internet. What VMware and other vendors are trying to do now is build out the infrastructure and applications needed to create a cloud environment.
"The VMware infrastructure technology has a lot of relevance both in the cloud itself by helping people build and operate clouds, but also as an onramp to the cloud that allows existing customers to easily migrate their compute loads outside of their environments and into the cloud and back again," Maritz said during the July 22 earnings call.
While Maritz, a former Microsoft executive who became VMware's CEO earlier in July, did not specifically indicate when VMware's new cloud computing technology would hit the market, it seems clear that the company will detail its efforts at the VMworld conference in September.
As server utilization increases, we’ll see if Intel’s Server processor sales slow.