New Products Automate IT Service Delivery and Business Continuity By VSM News Staff published: Monday, February 25 2008
VMware
Brings Unprecedented Levels of Automation to the Datacenter With Virtual
Machine Management Products
CANNES,
France, Feb. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization
solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today showcased four new virtual
machine management products that bring unprecedented automation of IT service
delivery and business continuity to the datacenter. These products extend the
VMware virtualization platform by automating previously error-prone, slow and
manual processes.
VMware
virtual machines are ideally suited for capturing and automating IT
processes. VMware virtual machines
encapsulate applications and operating systems in standardized,
hardware-independent packages that can be easily changed, moved and
manipulated. VMware's new management products take full advantage of the
mobility and manageability characteristics of virtual machines to deliver
scalable, repeatable and efficient IT. The products also leverage VMware
VMotion(TM) and the virtual machine packaging of an application and operating
system to provide one uniform way to capture and automate processes.
Today's IT departments are under increasing
pressure to create, deliver and maintain flexible and resilient IT services
that respond to changing business conditions and withstand any type of
downtime. The process of IT service delivery typically includes multiple steps:
build, deploy, update, monitor, recover, and retire. IT departments are often
overwhelmed with the sheer number of one-off requests for providing new IT
services or updating existing ones. Administrators also lack visibility into
the status of IT services leading to risk exposures or errors. Business
continuity has also traditionally been an intractable problem.
VMware's
new products leverage virtual machines to automate the steps of the IT service
delivery and business continuity processes, eliminating repetitive, rote tasks
and minimizing the margin for error. The result can be scalable, repeatable and
efficient IT processes.
Four New
Products for Management and Automation
- VMware is
introducing three IT service delivery products:
VMware Lifecycle Manager, VMware Lab Manager and VMware Stage
Manager. Each product extends the VMware
Infrastructure platform and uses virtual machines and VMware VMotion to enable
automation throughout the entire lifecycle of service delivery.
- VMware Lifecycle Manager addresses the needs
of infrastructure administrators, and allows companies to implement a consistent and automated process for requesting, approving, deploying, updating, and retiring virtual machines.
- VMware Lab Manager addresses the needs of
development and QA engineers and
the IT teams that support them by providing fast and simple
self-service provisioning of multi-tier virtual machine based environments while enabling IT control over policies.
- VMware Stage Manager addresses the needs
of the IT and application administrators responsible for rolling new and updated IT services into production, enabling streamlined and accelerated transition of applications through the pre-production stages - including integration, testing, staging, user acceptance testing - and into production.
For
Business Continuity, VMware demonstrated VMware Site Recovery Manager, which
can make disaster recovery more rapid, reliable, and manageable. Traditional
disaster recovery solutions are slow and prone to failures because they involve
many manual and complex steps, are almost impossible to test, and require exact
duplication of the production datacenter hardware to ensure reliable recovery.
VMware Site Recovery Manager uses hardware- and operating system-independent
mobile virtual machines to deliver a groundbreaking solution, which can make
disaster recovery more rapid, reliable, manageable, and affordable. VMware Site Recovery Manager delivers
centralized management of recovery plans, automates the recovery process, and
enables dramatically better testing of recovery plans.
"Customers have been deploying VMware Infrastructure as their
strategic virtualization platform to reduce capital and operating expenses,
help ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green," said
Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions. "Automation is
the next stage for the virtual datacenter. The new VMware products are designed
to increase the productivity of IT administrators by preventing virtual machine
sprawl and enabling business users to self-provision capacity on demand, and
they will bring unprecedented levels of resiliency to all software applications
running in VMware virtual machines."
"VMware Infrastructure together with the new VMware automation
solutions, like VMware Lab Manager and VMware Lifecycle Manager, provide us the
critical toolset to make the automated datacenter a reality," said Reid
Engstrom, global director shared technical services, Harley-Davidson Motor
Company. "This allows us to achieve operational excellence with lowered
unit costs and greater responsiveness to business users all while improving IT
controls."
"Embracing VMware Infrastructure 3 with our Business Service
Management strategy is critical for customers to be successful in mainstreaming
virtualization technologies within the datacenter. As more customers move in this direction, the
combination of VMware's automation products and BMC's Service Automation
products allow customers to automate critical IT processes spanning the
physical and virtual datacenter," said Kia Behnia, chief corporate
architect for BMC Software.
"Virtualization enables IT organizations
to automate tasks across traditionally disparate 'IT silos' such as application
development, and the IT infrastructure operations -- opening up a whole new
world for management in virtualized environments," said IDC Director
Stephen Elliot. "Virtualization also reduces the risk of downtime and
streamlines recovery from disasters. As IT organizations expand their
virtualized production environments, automation offers an opportunity to extend
the initial virtualization ROI while deploying IT services quickly and in
strict compliance with IT standards and policies."
Availability
VMware Lab
Manager is currently available. VMware Lifecycle Manager, VMware Stage Manager
and VMware Site Recovery Manager are expected to be available by the second
quarter of this year.
About
VMware
VMware
(NYSE: VMW) is the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop
to the datacenter. Customers of all
sizes rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business
continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2007 revenues of $1.3
billion, more than 100,000 customers and more than 10,000 partners, VMware is
one of the fastest growing public software companies. VMware is headquartered in Palo Alto,
California and on the web at www.vmware.com .
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