tl;dr

Just a few days ago I wondered aloud if VMWare are screwed following the abrupt departures of four of its eleven board members. Well yesterday they made a massive product announcement.

Virtual Datacentre OS further expands the already-best-of-breed infrastructure management tools to include the possibility of automatically expanding, on demand, your datacentre into another site (probably owned by a third party) somewhere in the cloud. One of the hats I used to wear was as a scalability analyst for the travel industry, where ecommerce traffic demands are grossly seasonal (it is not atypical to see 60% of traffic land in just two months of the year); I would have killed for some sensible model to rent extra capacity at just peak times. There is more analysis from The Register.

As part of this, they are publishing a new API, vStorage, which allows the integrated tools suite to command SANs to carry out disk provision, configure clustering, rollbacks, and failovers as VMs are created and taken online and offline. Again, The Register has good analysis of what this means; essentially, VMWare are once again blazing a trail into new and exciting territory that no other VM vendor has even thought about yet.

So, as m’learned friend James remarked, if all this awesome stuff happened on Diane Green’s watch — and as she only left a couple of months ago it must have been — why on earth did they get rid of her? And with her and her supporters gone, can VMWare keep up the cool stuff, or will the R&D falter now? There are exciting times ahead, for sure. 

Personal, Professional