News

New vSphere Offerings Focus on Operations, Data Protection

vSphere customers who want health, compliance and capacity information sans bells and whistles of the vCloud Suite can opt for new vSphere with Operations Management component. Also, VMware scales up VM data protection for midsized customers.

• By Michael Domingo
• 02/12/2013

VMware on Tuesday announced two new offerings for the higher end of the SMB market: vSphere with Operations Management and vSphere Data Protection Advanced. According to the company, the aim is to provide additional services for a large segment of its customers who need capabilities beyond what the basic vSphere hypervisor provides, but not quite all the bells and whistles of the enterprise-class vCloud Suite. Both solutions will be released some time within the next two months.

According to Mike Adams, group product line marketing manager for VMware vSphere,  vSphere with Operations Management was borne out of necessity, filling in the gap where some vSphere customers needed some more operational insight into their environments but weren't quite ready to leap up to the all-in enterprise proposition of the vCloud Suite.

"What we decided to do with vSphere with Operations Management, was find a way that  customers can get additional value from us," he explained in a phone briefing. "We wanted to provide more value than just the core platform in and of itself."

Adams said that vSphere for Operations Management is essentially a mashup of vSphere with the vCenter Suite Standard Edition.

"What we've seen over time is that companies, as they grow with vSphere, they need more details into their environments -- performance details, health details, capacity information, compliance, integration with adapters to third-party tools, basically a lot of analytics and reporting information," Adams explained, which are the core components of the Standard Edition that he focused during the phone briefing. "If I'm just starting out, I want to be able to manage more than what I can with vCenter Server, and for existing customers, we wanted to show them that the next evolution in your journey is to provide a more management-focused capability to what you're doing," he added.

Adams cites a Forrester study and a few other internal research reports that indicate that the in-between market that leans toward the higher end of the SMB segment was ripe for tapping. He said that those customers are realizing the benefits "around resolution times, consolidation ratios, and just the amount of savings you can get with vSphere and the vCenter Operations Management Suite Standard."

Adams said that VMware is "going to be a major focus for us, and in particular how we sell it through the channel. We think this a key play for our distributors and for our VAR folks."

vSphere Data Protection Advanced, the other new offering, also targets midsized organizations. It's based on the same virtual appliance, only instead of being limited to 2TB of data, this version scales up to 8TB. "With 8TB, we can now protect 200 to 600 VMs. That's the type of scale we're talking about here."

Scalability is one aspect that's new, but there's also new agents purpose-built for backing up SQL Server and Exchange. While VMware already offers an API that allows the standard vSphere for Data Protection to be tailored to customers' specific environments, this offering is unique: "When you do backups for those products, you need to have some type of technology that understands the application makeup when you do the backup, but particularly the recovery, capturing the logs, the data, all the pieces of that particular application."

vSphere with Operations Management will be available in Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, starting at $1,795 per processor. vSphere Data Protection Advanced will be $1,095 per processor.