VMware Building New Hybrid Cloud and Network Virtualization Technology

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VMware is gearing up to expand its virtualization product portfolio. During the company’s Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors today, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a pair of new initiatives designed to grow his company’s virtualization market footprint.

“Ultimately our plan is to radically simplify IT,” Gelsinger said during the event.

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VMware is already well positioned in the private cloud space with its existing vCloud and vSphere product offerings. The company is now aiming to gain a foothold in the emerging hybrid cloud space as well. To that end, Gelsinger announced that his company is working on a new vCloud Hybrid Cloud service that will officially launch at the end of the year.

The vCloud Hybrid Cloud service will become part of the newly formed Hybrid Cloud Services business unit at VMware. That business group will be led by Bill Fathers, who is now joining VMware after previously being the President of cloud computing services vendor Savvis.

Gelsinger referred to his company’s upcoming hybrid cloud services as leveraging the, ‘inside-out’ model.

“We’re viewing this as an extension of what our customers are already doing with their private cloud and now being able to take advantage of that in a fully hybrid way,” Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger explained that the with the upcoming Hybrid Cloud service, existing applications are compatible, leveraging the same network, security and policies enterprises are already using. Enterprises will be able to move workloads seamlessly from vCloud hybrid service and back, whenever needed.

Network Virtualization

VMware also announced its intention today to build out a new network virtualization platform known as NSX. The NSX platform will combine the existing VMware vCloud Networking and Security product with the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP).

VMware acquired Nicira in June of 2012 for $1.2 billion.

NSX will provide a completed abstracted set of Software Defined Networking (SDN) components, including routers and switches as well as security components and monitoring capabilities.

The NSX platoform is currently slated to officially launch in the second half of 2013.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.