The Platform Race

Wow – what a week!

Wikibon was humbled to be part of SiliconAngle’s Cube event, live at VMworld. It was an incredible experience where we interviewed more than 50 C-level executives, customers, bloggers and industry analysts. The perspectives we gained from this event were insightful and informative.

In addition, the broadcast reached nearly 200,000 live viewers over four days. Here’s a short clip of the wrap up – thanks to everyone who helped make this happen!

While I enjoyed all of the interviews I don’t have time right now to describe each of them in detail. Some of the highlights for me personally were:

*Interviewing Tod Nielsen – the Chief Operating Officer of VMworld and a lead spokesperson for the company. To me, Tod is the Steve Ballmer to Paul Maritz, who is the Bill Gates of VMware. These two former Microsoft execs are building  the next great platform company. Here’s his interview:

*Having Pat Gelsinger, the President and Chief Operating Officer of EMC on for the third time at the Cube. Pat is extremely articulate and insightful and has been a huge supporter of the Cube since day one. Ditto for Rich Napolitano, President of EMC’s Unified Division.

*Interviewing Tom Georgens, CEO of NetApp. I will definitely write up his segment at some point because his insights were right on. Georgens is understated and underrated in my opinion. His comments about 3PAR were very interesting – essentially saying the 3PAR acquisition wasn’t at all about the cloud, but rather about HP trying to fill a hole in its lineup and Dell trying to strategically transform the company.

*Meeting a number of other VMware execs, including Mark Egan – CIO who is (not surprisingly) pushing virtualization as hard as anyone on the planet – Steve Herrod – CTO who laid out a vision a year ago and was able to provide proof points as to how VMware has met its objectives – Rod Johnson, the brilliant and quirky CEO of Sprinsource whose passion for open source, simplification, developer productivity and transforming IT is impressive – Rick Jackson who kicked off our event and Richard McAniff, the avuncular head of development of VMware. I learned a lot speaking with these folks and would like to thank them for their support of the Cube.

*Meeting Bill Haggard from the Dallas Cowboys. He’s exactly the type of executive you’d expect to be working for Jerry Jones – Big, bad, energetic and smart – and 100% pure Dallas.

*Meeting a number of innovative and visionary entrepreneurs including Jim McNiel, the CSO of Falconstor who was so good we had him on twice; Bill Cook the CEO of Greenplum, David Flynn, CEO of Fusion-io whose company is completely transforming the way in which applications are written and deployed and Phil Soran of Compellent who is a super successful leader with a simple vision to simplify storage and bring mainframe-class function to small and mid-sized businesses.

There were six major themes I took from the event, including:

1. The Next Great Platform. VMware is using a gameplan from Microsoft, but adapted, to build the next great IT company of this century. In my opinion, this firm has the potential to have a market valuation of $100B by building out sets of infrastructure services (hypervisor, management, security, etc), platforms (with Spring) and even applications  (Zimbra). While I’m not 100% sold yet on the applications play it doesn’t matter right now – infrastructure and platforms will go a long way.

2. The VMware Ecosystem. To me, as it pertains to the data center, VMware is the new IT economy. The company’s vision of creating the data center platform/OS has tremendous momentum and is supported by virtually every major partner on the planet. The mantra from VMware execs is that for every dollar spent on VMware license revenue, $15 is spent on ecosystem spend. The company gets it – developers, open entries and exits to the major components of the platforms and focus on continued innovation. Good formula for 2010 and beyond.

3. The Cloud. In my opinion, the economic downturn of 2009 has accelerated cloud computing within data centers by 18 months. CEOs are forcing CIOs to look at cloud technologies and either become more agile internally or outsource. On demand, pay as you go, fast deployment, shift from CAPEX to OPEX models are coming and they’re coming fast. Naysayers who say cloud is just a buzzword or it’s just IT are living in the past. CIOs need to lead or fast-follow on this one because there is no getting out of the way.

4. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs)- Guests on the Cube such as Switch, Terremark, Verizon and nScaled underscored to me that CSPs are all about business. They monetize IT for profit and as such they will always be better at IT than most IT shops. That’s just the way it is. They will have the best physical security, logical security, staff, executives, processes and business models – or they will die.

5. Innovation and Competition. VMware is cooking on all cylinders. The company is growing revenues above 40% per year and its momentum is palpable. Microsoft is not sitting still – it is giving away the hypervisor as part of the OS, trying to package VMware out of the game and commoditize VMware’s offerings and hold on to its legacy past. For its part, VMware is returning the ball by providing all types of operating system services (e.g. IO, security, management, networking, backup, etc) surrounding the hypervisor with value-added function that is ahead in terms of its innovation.

If these were the only pieces of the puzzle I would say Microsoft will be able to hold serve. However the break point in my view will go to the one that gets to mobile first.

6. The Mobile Enterprise. Neither company has a track record here but the VMware ecosystem has great potential to innovate around the mobile enterprise. The whole thrust around moving beyond the desktop to the user as the focal point is the key. Virtual desktop needs to become virtual user where the end user has access to data and applications from any device, anywhere and any time. While Microsoft has the resources to succeed it doesn’t seem to have the formula because that formula is still too Windows-centric. The question is, can VMware define an alternative path and consequently a tipping point.

Over the next several weeks, folks from the Wikibon community will be sharing our thoughts on VMworld. Many thanks to all the individuals who participated in making VMworld 2010 a great success. Check out these great pictures from our man on the street – Kyle Owen.

vSocial Innovation

The true innovators of the show were our hosts from VMware.  John Troyer stands above the rest (yes he’s really tall, beloved by the community, and a PhD to boot) and he had huge behind-the-scenes support from Tony Dunn, Luke Kilpatrick and many more.  A nice touch was the great setup of tables at the keynote for bloggers.  The blogger’s lounge was a great place to bump into people (I believe that I met over 100 people that I follow on Twitter there throughout the week), and there were tons of scheduled and impromptu gatherings.  The Monday night Tweetup was impressive, with sponsors who provided pre-printed name tags and an open bar.  VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod also engaged intimately with the community including chatting with the bloggers before the keynote and having a special meeting with all of the vExperts.

The battle over the acquisition of 3PAR was definitely one of the most talked about subjects of the week; the HP, Dell and 3PAR attendees watched their words closely.  HP and Dell both have vibrant social media programs that engaged well with the VMware community online, in their booths and throughout the show.  I got to spend some time talking with Marc Farley, HP’s Calvin Zito, Jeff Sullivan and Ken Henault, and Dell’s Kong Yang and Andrew Gilman – great to see active social media advocates flourishing in all three of the companies.  There were so many fantastic people that I got to talk with that I can’t mention, but most of them are on the TweepML list for VMworld which I curated from the VMworld wiki, so go ahead and follow everyone.

Video Anywhere, Anytime, Any Scale

Video has been a growing wave in the social media space and it was available in every imaginable format at VMworld.  VMware has used live video to share the experience for those who can not attend.  Last year the keynotes were available live and John Troyer hosted a UStream chat.  This year, VMware upgraded the offering by bringing in SiliconANGLE.tv (pictured left to right, Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante, EMC President and COO Pat Gelsinger and SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier) which provided 3 1/2 days of live broadcasting videos with tons of executives, thought leaders and customers telling their proof points.  Compellent used video, live Twitter chats and some good viral messaging showcasing Heineken as a customer.  Kudos to Liem Nguyen and team for using beer to catch the eye and independent voices like Phil Jaenke (@rootwyrm) to get the message out rather than booth babes or raffles.  EMC and Cisco have a vested interest in storing and transmitting video, and both have excellent professional crews (disclaimer – I’ve known both crews for years and they treat me very well – see my videos from VMworld w/ EMC on the journey to the private cloud and Cisco blogger round-up of convergence, VMworld awards and more).  And between Flip video cameras, iPhones and Android phones, everyone else was walking around with video cameras, too. There is a VMworld TV channel, and lots of videos tagged VMworld 2010 on YouTube (here’s my channel), but we still need a better way to find, sort and consume video, similar to what we can do for blogs, Twitter and other news.

Past the Hype and Into Productivity

While there will always be the next new shiny object or application to gush about, the big takeaway of VMworld 2010 for me from a social perspective was people were using the tools more than talking about them.  While most companies have a long way to fully embedding social into their culture and processes, VMware’s VMworld showed that events can have a multi-dimensional social media offering that supports and amplifies the messaging of the event.  Speaking with John Troyer, he said that this was the “best VMworld ever”; that being said, we can all learn and iterate from our experiences.  Last year I had John share his lessons learned with an internal EMC audience, which helped with EMC World planning and led to more ideas for VMworld this year.  In the true spirit of social innovation, John has agreed to share his thoughts and lessons learned with the community in the coming weeks.  Companies should plan early to allow for a comprehensive offering of social and video that engages the relevant communities and reaches larger audiences.

UPDATE: Video below of John Troyer discussing this topic on the Live SiliconANGLE video.

1. The new stack for IT as a Service (ITaaS). In his keynote, CEO Paul Maritz laid out the three layers that make up the stack on which VMware will focus: Infrastructure Platform (centered around vSphere), Application Platform (the Spring acquisition is critical), and End User Access (Zimbra is in this bucket, along with virtual desktop including mobile).  Defining the market so specifically is not only good thought leadership, but also a way to box the competition out or to get them to fight battles on fronts where VMware has the upper hand. 
2. Ecosystem.  VMware is much more than server virtualization.  In his analyst day briefing, COO Tod Nielsen stated that VMware’s goal is to be the cornerstone of the next era in IT.  To do this, it is critical that they maintain a good working relationship with the ecosystem.  On the technology supplier side, will VMware’s increased portfolio of security, management and networking solutions create competitive conflicts that could slow their growth?  While it is only a small niche technology company that won’t have some coopetition with their ecosystem, VMware’s biggest relationships (including Dell, IBM, HP EMC and Cisco) now cross many product lines.  VMware got a boost in the management space with the products that were sold from EMC; it will be interesting to watch the EMC, RSA (subsidiary of EMC) and VMware (EMC is the majority stock holder) dynamic with vShield. Speaking of which, I know that the EMC/VMware relationship is heavily scrutinized. As someone who was part of the relationship even before the acquisition (from inside EMC working with VMware for 7 years), and now from the outside, I assure you: the companies operate independently and fairly. I did not hear a single concern or complaint about bias or favoritism towards EMC at the conference.
3. Mobility. The cloud is all about mobility and it was a consistent theme at the event.                        * vMotion – enabling VM mobility – is still one of VMware’s key differentiators against competitive virtualization offerings. Here’s a quick video with vExpert Aaron Delp on how vSphere 4.1 now supports 10Gb Ethernet for vMotion (if you have access, see the replay of VMworld session TA8440 – 10Gb & FCoE Real World Design Considerations).
4. While server virtualization may have hit a tipping point (more virtual applications were deployed in 2009 than physical applications), virtual desktop adoption has been moving slowly in replacing the traditional Windows desktop.  If the focus can turn to enabling a more flexible and mobile workforce, it should gain more traction.  There is a great opportunity for VMware to deliver business solutions not only on Apple’s iPad, but also potentially with Cisco (who announced their Cius tablet at Cisco Live in June) and HP (who is believed to have a Slate coming later this year).
5. Hybrid Cloud and the xSP. While the infrastructure providers are all putting together their own stacks of products and working on partnerships, when it comes to the cloud solutions for the enterprise, it is going to be a heterogeneous environment.  As companies adopt public cloud and create their own private clouds, it is the service providers that have a huge opportunity to help IT organizations deploy, manage and support the resulting hybrid cloud solutions.
6. vAgents of Change.  Virtualization is still relatively new to IT, but it has clearly crossed the chasm into a mainstream product line with 190,000 customers.  Leading the charge to deliver virtualization around the globe are 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals.  The culture of the virtualization community goes far beyond understanding a few products, as can be seen by the volunteer group that puts together the VM User Groups (VMUGs) and the passion of the vExperts.  Will these expert ambassadors of virtualization embrace and drive the change to cloud computing?

VMware is still a relatively small company compared with some of the traditional giants in IT, but with a strong vision, loyal customers, and growing ecosystem, they are on a trajectory to change the broader IT industry with ITaaS, just as they already have with server virtualization.

-          Any workload size

-          Instantaneous provisioning of workloads with end-to-end networking

-          No network constrains when deploying workloads where computing capacity exist

-          Scaling networks up and out

Xu further describes the vChassis as “a platform to simplify and standardize the management and development of scale-out, interoperable, and automated network services”, from the Ethernet, data link-L2 layer, through to all components that address communication aspects of the application (e.g., identifying and establishing the availability of the intended communications partner, such a web application, mobile device, file transfer end-point).

Thoughts (or maybe questions) on Where Security is Built in

The security mantra for everything virtualized is build it in, don’t bolt it on.  So the vision that Xu lays out begs the question …..“does the platform for distributed virtual networks become a built in enabler for end-to-end security services – from the MAC address to the application?”  Standard security services and mechanism are part of the OSI reference model.  Services are a collection of mechanisms and features that protect networks and mechanisms are the controls that are implemented to provide the security services.  Here they are:

In his presentation,VMware’s Xu indicated that vChassis includes a “workload-centric platform” and new management layer that provides policy-level configurations and resources to a virtual machine when it’s created and wherever it goes.  But which security services and mechanisms are managed as part of this platform (e.g., vChassis Intrustion Detection)? And will the platform provide the security services and mechanisms (e.g., end-point authentication, data integrity), or just the configuration and management control over services and mechanisms enabled by other parts of the ecosystem?

Certainly another part of the bold vision for security at VMware.  At VMworld 2010, vChassis and vCSD, and vShield have joined VMSafe, vSphere trust zones, RSA DLP, Archer, enVision, and Ionix at the tip of the spear for VMware’s security platform.

From vSwitch to vChassis

VMware’s efforts in networking began in earnest with vNetwork solutions, beginning with the Managed Virtual Switch (vSwitch) in 2006, and then the Distributed Virtual Switch (VMware vDS and Cisco’s 1000v) in 2009.  Their proposed next step is a Distributed Virtual Network or “vChassis” as the virtual network layer for cloud environments.  VMware stated that they believe that they can solve any issue through a layer of abstraction or virtualization and that the networking industry needs a paradigm shift to enable cloud economics.

The vChassis vision is to create a Distributed Virtual L2-7, enabling new scale-out, on-demand, line-rate, efficient and elastic virtual L2-7.  This was not a product announcement, but a vision to enable a platform for “Network Infrastructure Programmability”.  Basically, they view it as a virtual networking director (not to be confused with the new vCloud Director) which will have virtual line cards.  Potential line cards discussed were a “vChassis L2 Switch Line Card and a vChassis Intrusion Detection Service Line Card”.  This platform and the components will be fulfilled and supported by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Mobility restrained by current L2 – inside or between datacenters (how does this connect to Cisco’s OTV?).

My Quick Take

I think that VMware’s vision does a good job of articulating the requirement for scalable, flexible, multi-tenant L2 solutions (check out some of Howie’s slides on Kendrick Coleman’s blog post).  It is a bold statement for VMware to say that they can solve the issues of Layer 2 – I hear rumblings from the networking ecosystem that this could be a point of contention.  Practitioners need to make sure that decisions from app groups are discussed with the networking team.  There is increasing interdependence between network, servers and storage and this is an exciting time for the networking world.  I’m looking forward to digging into this topic more in the coming weeks.

At 11:30 PT today, September 1st, I will be hosting a networking discussion live from VMworld featuring Abner Germanow, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Juniper Networks.  You can watch live at SiliconANGLE.tv – the recordings will also be available on that site.

UPDATE – the video segment with Abner should be available soon. Below is a quick video with Doug Gourlay of Arista Networks who shares his perspective on the vChassis vision.

To state this another way, vCSD puts the “private” in public clouds by enabling a set of security capabilities, audit controls, service commitments, and certifications that users have come to expect from internal IT organizations.  Service providers running the VMware infrastructure with vCSD should now have the capability to offer a comparable, predicable and tunable security and control environment to IT and business users, capable of meeting the requirements of more critical application or operational workloads.

VMware vCloud Datacenter Services incorporate VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director – the same infrastructure virtualizing datacenters and supporting private clouds – creating a new level of security interoperability and reducing security incompatibility across internal and external IT resources.

Creating this set of service functionality for IT providers with messaging around security interoperability and compatibility puts VMware center stage in the security business, complete with VMware vCloud Powered certification badges for service providers offering virtual cloud service director SLAs .  In essence, all that VMware has done over the past 3 years to secure the virtualization journey to the private cloud through platform offerings and its partner ecosystem is now being fully extended to public and hybrid environments.

So the big questions from yesterday’s formal announcements are:

• Is it possible for Paul Maritz to stay out of the security business if his technology is at the core of the virtualization journey?  Can VMware just be a “security enabler”, and not a provider.  The answer, absolutely not.   VMware is, among other things, a significant security solutions provider, plain and simple.  Products, APIs, integrations, partners, services — it all there.
• How secure does vCSD make the journey of critical business workloads to public and hybrid cloud? The answer (of course), it depends. VMware is providing a capability to cloud service providers that suggests a degree of security and control equal to if not better than a business can get internally, and time will tell whether the bar is being raised or lowered.
• And finally, will the “VMware vCloud Powered” badge be a service differentiator in the marketplace, and will customs pay more for the security and control it represents.  The answer, probably not. Except for maybe the very high-end of the market, businesses will come to consider this degree of protection and risk management as table stakes in their cloud strategy over the long run.  The initial differentiation will diminish over time.

• Where are the security proof points – vShield family of security products, vCSD, RSA Archer for VMWare, etc. are all announced, so what’s the expectation for customer commitments and implementations?
• What say you, CISO? How engaged is the CISO industry in these and other advancements in securing IT virtualization and the cloud?
• How can these features safely extend virtualization to the public cloud? vCSD is the answer, but does it raise bar?  Can you get better security from a certified VMware vCloud Service Director provider than you can get internally?  Transferring IT and business risk to a third-partly is tempting but tricky move.
• What does this mean to others in the security ecosystem (e.g.., Altor Networks, HyTrust, Symplified, Venafi, FaceTime, many others) trying to add cloud security value; what’s the opportunity for them?
• Is the white space on the security table still a safe place to be if you’re a security technology provider for the cloud, or will VMware move quickly cover that space too?
• Are these features, specifically those in the new vShield family, be imbedded with vBlock? If so, are the features selectable, and is there a cost impact?
• What does this mean for the other developers of the Secure Multi-tenant Standard – Cisco and Netapp?  How do these announcements fit into the Standard?
• Any tie in to what Intel is doing w/McAfee and the cloud? Securing VDI maybe?
• CA just announced the acquisition of Arcot for cloud identity and access management.  Would this be for just external identities, or infrastructure identities managed by vCSD and the vShield products?

First – here’s the announcement in case you haven’t seen it: 

Dear Friends of Storwize, 

I’m pleased to announce that Storwize is now an IBM company. With Storwize, IBM has acquired the premier data compression technology for businesses seeking to improve storage efficiency. It is the only storage solution that can compress primary file data — or data that clients are actively using — in real-time without affecting performance. 

IBM has aggressively pursued a strategy to grow and diversify its storage portfolio through innovation and with targeted acquisitions. The Storwize acquisition is an opportunity to strengthen IBM’s innovative products and improve its competitiveness. It is also an opportunity to provide, you our customers and partners with a broader portfolio of products and services. 

IBM Storwize products will be integrated into IBM’s Storage portfolio under the name “IBM Storwize” and Storwize employees will join the IBM Storage and Networking team, the Storage Development team, and IBM’s Global Sales and Services teams. Please visit the updated IBM Storwize web site for more information at www.storwize.com. 

Best regards, 

 

Ed Walsh
CEO, Storwize 

Walsh started his career at EMC after graduating college with a “double E.” He was working, not in sales as I and everyone else always thought, but in product marketing. After a short period at EMC in the early ’80′s he left the company and launched a startup called Berkshire Computer Products with a friend who worked with him at EMC. The company was a reseller of memories and peripherals to end users. They bootstrapped and then ramped the company up to more than $80M in annual revenue and then sold to CNT where Walsh ended up in the sales side of the house. He eventually ended up running Avamar, turning that company around and selling it to EMC. Then did it again with Virtual Iron (sold to Oracle) and now again with Storwize. Walsh is in his early 40s.  

I’m not going to give you all the “inside baseball” on this post but one of the things Walsh told me at the time was there were three keys to getting a startup turned around and ready for a sale.  

1. Get the skeletons out of the closet fast – there are always skeletons
2. Openly communicate them to the board
3. Bring in a key team
4. Execute very fast

Walsh summed it up with this quote:

Don’t hit the gas until you fix the brakes.

In the case of Storwize, the skeletons were 1) the company had some customer support issues that needed to be addressed. The product worked as advertised but it didn’t always work the way customers wanted it to work. You know the story – under this condition the product will do X – when the customer wants it to do something other than X. 2) Finances – Storwize didn’t have enough cash and had some clean up to do on the books.  

Walsh brought in two key people to help him – Mary Henry the CFO and Steve Kenniston the VP of Technology and Strategy. It was clear what Mary had to do – she’d done it for Walsh before at Virtual Iron – clean up the finances. You can’t sell a company with sloppy books because a company can’t perform due diligence on you– it’s really simple. I met Mary once. Lives near me. We have kids that compete in soccer. Nice lady. Turns out she’s a financial whiz. Operationally she’s Walsh’s Ms. Inside – a highly experienced professional that knew exactly what Walsh wanted, how he wanted it done and of course when – (aka fast).  

Kenniston brought a completely different skill set. For those who don’t know Steve he’s basically one of these guys who is perfect for a startup because he’s Mr. execution (and he will execute you if you’re not as committed as he is). He can pretty much do anything except write code – (note: don’t ask Steve to write code). But he’s really good (perhaps one of the best I’ve ever met) at understanding a technology and communicating it to customers. Walsh wanted Kenniston because he knew Steve from Avamar and also because his job at his previous company, EMC was  to do a zillion briefings in EMC’s famous Executive Briefing Center (EBC) explaining the intricacies of Avamar’s technology. Let me explain why Kenniston was so critical to Walsh.

When I first heard about Storwize, David Floyer and I debriefed on the company. And we both said “wow – really cool technology but they need to figure out a way to take this IP and embed it.” Even at the time, it was clear compression would be buried inside the storage array. Walsh knew this too. If you can demonstrate the technology can be embedded and not just delivered as an appliance it makes your valuation go weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee – because an acquirer can place the technology in way more places.

So Walsh’s first directive was to put Kenniston on a plane (solo) to Israel and have him go make nice with the development team – without the CEO in the room. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but most of the rocket-science-class Israeli engineers that I’ve met tend not to lay out all their secrets, especially in the very first encounter with Americans. Kenniston’s job was make get close with the development team in Israel, understand the secret sauce and come back with a way to communicate it to the world.

What happened next was impressive. I remember Kenniston telling me he was going to Israel for the first time. Two weeks after he returned, Storwize was on a roadshow communicating the Random Access Compression Architecture (RACE). Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. IBM saw this, the lightbulb went off and started to pursue Storwize more seriously. I’m not saying it was Kenniston’s RACE concept that was the hook for IBM – my guess is IBM already got it. But RACE meant the cat was out of the bag and IBM knew Walsh would start selling the RACE concept to EVERYONE. So IBM went after Storwize to grab the IP which is incredibly unique.

There’s more to this story but it boils down to great IP, experience, team, and savvy, both internally with the board and external to the market. That’s how Walsh was able to sell a tiny little company with low single digit revenues for a reported $140M. What happens next will be fun to watch. IBM will cycle Storwize through its process and my bet is it will pop the Storwize technology into a lot of products, including it’s block-based stuff.

I have some other perspectives on this that I’ll share after VMworld. Stay tuned.

Jumping forward to day 1VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, enterprise users and IT providers and partners are learning more about where that security spear is pointing – reliable segregation of virtual computing resources, access management for services, governance and audit reporting – all important features needed to round out a comprehensive security model for cloud computing.

It’s clear that the strategy to imbed and instrument security within the virtualization layer is playing out, with announcements that add to and expand the use of VMsafe security APIs, the packaging of a family of security capabilities in vShield,  virtual cloud service director access management,  and the expansion of the Archer and enVision platforms to improve security reporting, control, and event management.  Here’s a quick summary of the day 1 announcements and a peak at day 2:

• vShield Edge, vShield Zones, and vShield Endpoint are packaged together as the vShield Family and operate at the virtual perimeter layer of the cloud security framework.  These products enable a) VPN and firewall for the virtual machine (as compared with similar capabilities at the hypervisor layer provided by Altor Networks), b) end-point malware and virus protection for VDI deployments, and c) allow for a policy-based virtual perimeter to moved in tact with a VM/Application/OS environment as it moves from host-to-host.
• a virtual cloud service director, or vCSD, allows users to secure vCenter environments as a logical pool of virtualized resources (compute, network, storage) under a shared role based access control system integrated with an enterprise active directory.
• And from EMC, an expansion of the RSA Archer eGRC platform to include a library 100+ VMware-specific controls that map to current audit and control frameworks such as FISMA, PCI-DSS and HIPAA, and enhancements to enVision security information and event management platform to provide a more comprehensive assessment of security events from across the enterprise.

With these announcements, the table for security continues to be set.  Later in the show, expect to hear more about the security bake-off between hypervisor vendors, updates on the Intel/VMWare/RSA project to build a hardware/firmware trust base  for hypevisor and VM operations, and maybe applications, and an approach to building a compliance aware virtual environment.

The vShield software family embeds security functionality directly into the virtual environment that previously was either tied to specific hardware (such as an appliance or networking gear) or to specific servers.  This means that security settings can be moved with a VM when they are VMotioned.  These security enhancements are especially crucial for enabling multi-tenancy and federated (internal/external) cloud deployments.  For more on vShield, check out Chris Hoff’s post on Rational Survivability. Since the virtualized security functionality is very new compared with hardware-based solutions from Juniper and F5, customers should plan to bring it into test/dev environments first.

Moving functionality into the virtual environment also continues the trend of shifting control of the solution (even when the APIs are used by partners) to VMware.  One of the biggest things that attracted EMC to acquiring VMware in the first place was that a virtualization environment shifted intelligence (and dollars) away from servers. VMware has been marching along a path of integrating parts of the stack (see the Wikibon research on The Value of the VMware Integration Journey) – each step helps companies deploy more applications and solutions in a virtual environment; it also moves the integrated part of the stack in the direction of commoditization.  There is still room for companies to differentiate, but a storage solution with VAAI, a management solution integrated into vCenter or now a security solution that works with vShield are all going to be turning some control over to VMware.

I do think that moving to embedded solutions (either in hardware or virtual) is much better than appliances.  Interoperability, management and trouble shooting any solution with an appliance is inherently much more complicated.  Chuck Hollis of EMC makes a good case that it is inevitable that anything Intel-based should be offered with a virtual appliance option.  Of course, as the majority owner of VMware, EMC would be thrilled to watch VMware become the new Microsoft in a cloud computing ecosystem.

VMware’s Chief Operating Officer, Tod Nielsen, also worked with Maritz at Microsoft.  He is scheduled to be on the live video broadcast from VMworld tomorrow (Tuesday, August 31st) at 2pm PT.  Tune into SiliconANGLE.tv to hear Nielsen, other VMware executives talk about VMware’s plans for “Virtual Roads, Actual Clouds.”  There will also be many customers on the broadcast discussing the real-world proof points of their virtualization and cloud environments.