VMware is stepping up efforts in the software defined data centre space after making several updates to its main storage management and storage virtualisation products.
The company announced the latest version of its storage software, called San 6, has up to four-and-a-half times greater performance and double the scalability than before.
Other features include a two-tier all-flash architecture, a throughput of seven million input/output operations per second (IOPS), and increased support for blades.
Also announced today was the VMware vSPhere 6, VMware vSphere with Operations Management 6 and the VMware Virtual SAN 6.
VmWare also launched VMware Integrated OpenStack, will is designed to help smaller IT departments with to deploy an OpenStack cloud within minutes.
The company said the products aim to reduce the need for storage hardware and specialised networking, allowing customers to deploy applications more quickly at reduced costs.
Raghu Raghuram, VP and general manager of VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center Division, says an increasing number of customers are looking for a "simple, cost-effective and cloud-aware" approach to storage.
"VMware Virtual SAN 6 and VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes will deliver on this, and represent the next phase of our software-defined storage strategy. They address customer requirements through an improved hypervisor-converged storage tier, and a new virtual machine-aware integration with existing storage arrays," he said.
VMware’s CTO Ben Fathi said: "As our customers accelerate growth, their IT organisations are expected to drive transformation, enhance efficiency and bring more value to the business than ever before.
"We are helping them achieve these goals through continued innovation in VMware vSphere as the platform for their hybrid cloud strategy. VMware vSphere is the gold standard by which all other virtualisation technologies are measured, and vSphere 6 raises the bar even higher."
