VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger kicked off his company’s VMworld 2014 conference with a message – Be Brave. Gelsinger’s message was intended for attendees but is also a message that is reflective of his company’s approach to the rapidly evolving Software Defined Data Center landscape.
During his VMworld keynote address, Gelsinger noted that the biggest risk to IT today is in perpetuating the status quo. To that end, Gelsinger outlined a number of new innovations and initiatives at VMware to shake up the landscape.
Among the new items announced by Gelsinger is a hardware appliance effort known as the EVO initiative. VMware has always been a software company and that’s not changing with EVO. Gelsinger explained that EVO is an attempt to deliver a simpler solution for hyper-converged infrastructure.
“EVO is the next evolution of infrastructure,” Gelsinger said. “It is a family of products that is the fastest way to deploy the Software Defined Data Center.”
The EVO hardware is VMware’s software, packaged and integrated with hardware for an easy to deploy solution. There are currently two efforts within the EVO platform. The first is known as EVO RAIL, which is an appliance solution designed for up to 100 Virtual Machines to run. The promise of EVO RAIL is getting a systems up and running inside of 15 minutes. VMware’s initial set of EVO RAIL partners include: Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, inspur, net one and Supermicro. The second EVO solution is known as Rack and is about enabling an entire data center deployment in under two hours.
OpenStack and Docker
Gelsinger also used his keynote as the platform to announce new OpenStack cloud and Docker virtualization initiatives. In the past, many industry pundits have often thought of OpenStack and Docker as being competitive alternatives to VMware, but that’s not the case at all.
The new VMware Integrated OpenStack platform is a complete cloud platform that provides deep integration with VMware’s virtualization and management tools. The basic premise is to offer enterprises choice in the cloud with a VMware optimized platform. Gelsinger noted that the new VMware OpenStack solution can enable VMware users to embrace OpenStack if they so choose.
“It is choice without disruption,” Gelsinger said.
That same idea of choice is driving VMware’s embrace of Docker. VMware’s ESX hypervisor is a traditional Virtual Machine (VM) technology, while Docker is a container virtualization technology. Gelsinger said that to date, developers and users and have had to choose between using a virtual machine and a container for virtual application delivery.
VMware now has multiple partnerships in place to make Containers run well in VMware. Those partnerships include a PaaS partnership with Pivotal, a development partnership with Google and its Kubernetes container management technology and a partnership with Docker Inc. Gelsinger also announced Project Fargo, which is a VMware effort to enable Docker containers to run faster on a virtual machine than they can running natively on Linux.
“The best way to deliver containers is through a virtual machine,” Gelsinger said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 05, 2020
The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
August 14, 2020
Datamation is the leading industry resource for B2B data professionals and technology buyers. Datamation's focus is on providing insight into the latest trends and innovation in AI, data security, big data, and more, along with in-depth product recommendations and comparisons. More than 1.7M users gain insight and guidance from Datamation every year.
Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.
Advertise with Us
Property of TechnologyAdvice.
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this
site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives
compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products
appear on this site including, for example, the order in which
they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies
or all types of products available in the marketplace.