The Lumenate Perspective on VMworld 2013

The world of IT that we know has always been in a constant state of change. These changes are driven by customer’s needs, technology innovations and good old fashioned progress. There are some in the industry who think we are changing even faster as IT matures. Others say we have always been changing at the same rate but perception is in the eye of the beholder. Well at VMworld this year we got a glimpse of how the IT industry will be changing over the next few years.
The main concepts at VMworld this year were:

• Software Defined Networking 
• Software Defined Storage 
• Hybrid Cloud Services 
• Flash (SSD Arrays, PCIe Flash Cards and More)

Even though this was a VMware driven event, VMware has been a major player in the industry of innovation over the past 10 years and we expect these concepts and technologies to have wide reaching effects across the industry.

Software Defined is the new “term of the day”. What VMware is introducing may not be the end all be all, it will help to push the industry to accept another way of working/thinking.

Many people are going to confuse “Software Defined” as a new thing, it is not. The concept of Software Defined, is to move the control plane that has been traditionally tied to hardware and make it agnostic of the platform it is running on. The reason this isn’t new is because VMware introduced Software Defined Computing with the introduction of VMware ESX back in 1999. But back then the only aspects that were Software Defined was the CPU/memory. What VMware has introduced is the concept of moving the Networking Control Plane out of our traditional proprietary networking vendors into a software layer that will allow anyone to use any networking vendor as a more basic switch. Same goes for the Software Defined Storage introduction. Many of the storage features previously only available with external storage controllers will be available in software directly integrated at the Hypervisor.

Lumenate is a Cisco Gold partner and have top level status with EMC, HDS and Netapp. We design and implement solutions for our clients using these technologies on a daily basis and more often than not these are deployed in conjunction with VMware technologies. From our standpoint these announcements from VMware are exciting, we’ve got more options and new and better ways to solve challenges for our clients.

The other major topics at VMworld were definitely important, but just not as industry thought provoking. The VMware Hybrid Cloud Service is VMware’s Cloud Offering that allows a traditional VMware customer to manage their private and public deployments in the same fashion. As well customers will be able to more easily extend their existing VMware environments into the VMware Hybrid Public Cloud.

The Lumenate Perspective on VMworld 2013