Software is transforming every industry as businesses differentiate themselves and compete more effectively with the help of applications and services that deliver innovative customer experiences. This digital business transformation presents an opportunity for CIOs and IT teams to help their organizations become more agile, to build and deliver both traditional and cloud-native applications more rapidly, and drive down costs without sacrificing governance. Today’s updates to VMware’s cloud management platform will further enable IT teams to accelerate digital business transformation initiatives through new and improved capabilities for delivering applications into production more rapidly along with increased transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services across the hybrid cloud.
“IT is under constant pressure to help get applications into production faster, and to drive down costs without sacrificing governance,” said Ajay Singh, senior vice president and general manager, Management Suite Business Unit, VMware. “VMware’s hybrid cloud management platform is uniquely positioned to help IT organizations navigate the choppy waters of the digital business transformation. Today’s updates will further help IT to deliver service agility across the public and private cloud while achieving service cost benefits. Our cloud management platform advancements in the second half of 2015 are another big step toward delivering on our vision of a next-generation, platform that is application-aware and self-optimizing.”
VMware Refreshes Cloud Management Platform with Automation and Business Solutions Updates
VMware’s cloud management platform combines the capabilities of its cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions into a single integrated solution. It delivers a comprehensive management stack for the software-defined data center that enables IT to deliver unified services at the speed of business, but with the control and cost efficiency that IT requires. The integration between the platform and VMware infrastructure and services helps customers to more easily adopt a software-defined data center architecture.
Today, VMware is evolving its cloud management platform with new and improved updates including:
1. VMware vRealize Automation 7 – Unified Services Delivery across Hybrid Clouds
A major product release, VMware vRealize Automation 7 introduces unified service blueprint capabilities that will enable IT and DevOps teams to simplify and accelerate the delivery of integrated multi-tier applications with application-centric networking and security across clouds.
New unified service blueprints will enable the modeling of infrastructure, networks, security, applications and custom IT services including their relationships and dependencies within a graphical canvas. This latest release is integrated with VMware NSX® 6.2 to dynamically configure networks and micro-segmentation unique to each application modeled in the blueprint designer. VMware vRealize Automation 7 blueprints will span the hybrid cloud featuring out-of-the box support for VMware vCloud® Air™ and Amazon Web Services (AWS), including new support for VMware vCloud Government Service™ and AWS GovCloud, OpenStack Kilo, and VMware vSphere® 6 Update 1. The unified service blueprints will be accessible through APIs or CLIs as code for textual and human readable authoring of blueprints by DevOps teams.
This new release will also greatly enhance extensibility through an Event Broker, which will allow new functionality without changing core code to preserve upgradability. It will also feature simplified consumer APIs for requesting and managing services. Now featuring integration with VMware Identity Manager™, VMware vRealize Automation 7 will offer enhanced identity services including multi-factor authentication, SmartCard support, the ability to integrate with federated external authorization services, and more. Additionally, VMware vRealize Automation 7 will introduce a dramatically consolidated architecture with simplified installation that will reduce deployment time by up to 37 percent for most configurations (compared to the previous release) to help IT organizations accelerate time to value.
VMware vRealize Automation significantly accelerates application deployment, resulting in improved productivity, the ability to deliver new application functionality faster, and a reduction in costs, according to a Forrester Research Total Economic Impact study published in June 2015. The study noted that VMware vRealize Automation customers achieved the following benefits:
· Accelerated application delivery by an average of 18 days
· A reduction of 144 hours in application development time per request
· An average of $4,451 hardware costs avoidance benefits per application
· Reduced overall capacity usage by 10 percent
· Twenty-five percent hardware efficiency gains per year
2. VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 – Costing and Pricing of Hybrid Clouds
VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 introduces several new and enhanced capabilities to provide IT teams with increased transparency and control over the costs and quality of IT services. The release features new costing and pricing policies for private and public clouds including VMware vCloud Air, AWS, and all other clouds supported by vRealize Automation. VMware vRealize Business Standard 7 also supports Microsoft Azure for easy, comprehensive private and public cloud cost comparisons. The enhanced showback capabilities of this new release will enable IT to provide fine-grained cost reporting to the Line of Business including showback across private and public clouds, a clear month-to-date and monthly cost projection analysis, and costs grouped by business service to provide business context. New planning and cost optimization capabilities will visualize costs of used and remaining capacity by data center, will allow modeling of new workloads, and analyze the impact on the remaining capacity or costs as well as quantify potential savings from reclamation opportunities.
