EMC Releases New Virtualisation Kit for SMBs

By Greg McNevin

October 9, 2007: EMC’s VMware has announced three new products that it says are tailor made for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and designed to enable IT admins to rapidly and easily deploy virtualisation infrastructure.

Expected to be available before the end of the year, the trio of new bundles are, according to VMware’s SMB director Ben Matheson, will give smaller firms the same benefits as large enterprises and help them reduce the cost and complexity of their IT infrastructure.

Matheson says that services such as disaster recovery, high availability, simplified IT management and reduced energy costs are all now within SMB capabilities, as are the increased service levels, and savings inherent with virtualisation.

“The new VMware Infrastructure packaging delivers the features, functionality and training that will help enable SMBs to more rapidly experience the value of virtual infrastructure,” said Matheson in a statement.

The SMB bundles are based on the latest release of VMware Infrastructure, the industry's third-generation software suite and help to decrease power consumption, eliminate manual tracking and patching of virtual infrastructure and increase overall infrastructure availability according to the firm.

The new offerings include VMware ESX Server 3i, VMware Guided Consolidation and VMware Update Manager. These will respectively aid SMBs deploy virtualisation infrastructure, consolidate and migrate physical servers to virtual ones, and keep the whole operation updated automatically.

VMware says the three new bundles will be available in “Acceleration Kits” before the end of the year, and priced at between US$2,995 (AU$3,360) and US$14,499 (AU$16,250).

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