VMware`s latest offering, vSphere, will be commercially available in SA by the second quarter of this year.
According to Chris Norton, VMware`s regional director for Southern Africa, the new solution is being test run by several South African companies. Local customers could expect to start seeing commercial sale of the offering sometime in the second quarter, he adds.
Norton would not disclose the names of the companies testing the solution. VMware locally deals with some of the larger financial institutions and has some government departments running its technologies.
The virtualisation company is hyping the solution as "the industry`s first operating system for building the internal cloud".
It is built on the company`s foundation of the virtualisation hypervisor, which gives it the opportunity to build a data centre or cloud computing solution that is completely platform-agnostic.
According to Norton, any system or application can run over the OS without being concerned about the platform (Linux, Microsoft) or the resources. "Our aim is to change mindsets from hardware-as-a-service and software-as-a-service, to IT-as-a-service," he says.
New to the sky
Cloud computing is still a new concept to most businesses and could take some time to take off. However, Gartner predicts that within two years, "more than half of large enterprise data centre executives expect to get some IT services from the cloud".
It also believes virtualisation is the ideal way to have cloud services delivered to the enterprise.
Norton agrees, saying that at some point, most companies will not want to concern themselves with IT and the related costs; rather they will want it served and managed elsewhere.
Norton says, while the concept of serving solutions from the cloud is still new and undecided, the solution is designed to be implemented within a company`s architecture, and can be later migrated out.
Global sentiment around the solution is mixed, with some industry specialists warning against going back to an archaic mainframe-type solution and others saying it is a revolutionary step for cloud computing.
However, Gartner says: "This represents a further leap forward that promises to capture the imagination of enterprises and service providers alike."
The solution will be available at various price points, starting at R2 000 per processor, which is the entry-level option, through R4 000 per processor for the enterprise offering.
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