VMware Is Aiming For The Cloud

Customers still learning about clouds

The trend VMware is seeing in the midrange and SMB market is that companies generally start off modernising their data centres and IT systems by adding a virtualisation layer first, Raghuram said. Once they’ve their reorganised their applications and storage pools, then they look at adding cloud services where needed.

The more adventurous – and that usually means larger-budget – enterprises then explore building a private cloud system to tie together the company internally and link it to a supply chain and/or business partners tom improve efficiencies and save costs over time.

“For smaller companies, it’s different; they can’t do IT in the same way, because is often too complicated for them,” Raghuram said. “But that doesn’t mean they can’t get help to modernise.”

Customers generally understand virtualisation and how it makes IT systems more efficient, Raghuram said, but there’s still a lot of education needed about the nature and and advantages of cloud computing.

“The larger companies certainly know about all this. What we’re seeing now that we didn’t see a year ago is newer customers saying, ‘Now that I get it, tell me how does it map to what I’m doing, and how do I get there?'” Raghuram said. “Very often the ‘how do you get there’ starts with virtualisation.”

Raghuram said that globally, the geographic sectors that are growing fastest in the deployment of virtualised systems include China, India, Russia, South America and parts of Eastern Europe.

We asked Raghuram, if most businesses have their legacy applications that already work, why should they change anything if it isn’t broken?

“One of the great virtues of virtualisation is that it takes existing applications and drops them into a more modern environment and gives them more modern attributes. So application migration has always been a big use case for us – forget about the cloud,” Raghuram said.

“Once they put that existing app into a virtual machine which runs on a cloud infrastructure – that being a vSphere structure inside an enterprise, or at a service provider that’s external – they can take the same application and move it around,” Raghuram said. “That assumes that the data can also move around. But certainly, inside of a data center, that data is available. So that’s how they go about it.”

Gemstone acquisition will loom large

VMware is very aware that to build a high-functioning cloud system, the data needs to be as close as possible -at least in virtuality – to the virtual machine running the workload. Raghuram said that VMware’s recent acquisition of Gemstone and its prized data fabric technology is going to do just that.

Gemstone will become strategically more important to the company as time goes on, Raghuram said.  Gemstone’s fabric insulates the application from the underlying physical location of the data, by either caching the data or moving it around.

“This makes the data appear local to the application for better response, et cetera,” Raghuram said. “But the real source of the data could be back inside the enterprise, or in some other location.”

In order words, it’s about abstracting the source of data to make the application run faster and more efficiently.

“We’re really excited about this technology. You’ll see us talking about this in the days and months to come,” Raghuram said.