One the heels of the vFabric buzz that opened VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, Day 3 showcased Howie Xu, R&D Director at VMworld, and his vision for the next gen of virtualized networks, that easily and effectively connect end-users and access devices to application workload regardless of location.  Howie defined VMworld’s vision of distributed virtualized network as a journey (vChassis Journey) that encompasses 4 key concepts, summarized here and further described at Kendrickcolemen.com.

-          Any workload size

-          Instantaneous provisioning of workloads with end-to-end networking

-          No network constrains when deploying workloads where computing capacity exist

The security promise of VMware’s Virtual Cloud Service Delivery (vCSD) is clear and simple:  to allow business to extend beyond datacenters to external infrastructure service providers with interoperable, consistent, and measurable security and audit capabilities.

To state this another way, vCSD puts the “private” in public clouds by enabling a set of security capabilities, audit controls, service commitments, and certifications that users have come to expect from internal IT organizations.  Service providers running the VMware infrastructure with vCSD should now have the capability to offer a comparable, predicable and tunable security and control environment to IT and business users, capable of meeting the requirements of more critical application or operational workloads.

A few more questions (and others specific to vCSD) about security to kick around at VMWorld 2010, as the VMware security spear continues to sharpen:

• Where are the security proof points – vShield family of security products, vCSD, RSA Archer for VMWare, etc. are all announced, so what’s the expectation for customer commitments and implementations?
• What say you, CISO? How engaged is the CISO industry in these and other advancements in securing IT virtualization and the cloud?

I’m at VMworld and the announcement that Storwize is now an IBM company crossed my desk yesterday. I spent about 2 hours with Ed Walsh a few weeks ago reviewing his philosophy, approach and getting some details about Storwize and the history of the company that I didn’t know. In particular, Walsh went deep with me about his team and the US-based people he brought in. I don’t have all the details summarized and will be posting after VMworld but the interview was fascinating and I wanted to share the high level with you. 

First – here’s the announcement in case you haven’t seen it: 

Back a few months at EMC World 2010 in Boston, one of the more interesting proclamations about securing cloud computing came from Joe Tucci who said, and I’m paraphrasing “VMware is the tip of the security spear” for private cloud, and cloud computing in generation.  This make sense of course, given the important role of the hypervisor, in the this case vSphere, in providing secure multi-tenant operations for application workloads, virtual desktops, system administration, and ad hoc user computing.