Quiet VMworld 2017 Focuses on Security, Building Cloud Infrastructure

Let’s face it—not all IT conferences are going to be chock full with news every year, even with the continual churn of new products every few months and rapidly evolving technology trends. VMworld 2017, held Aug. 17-31 at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas, fit into the ho-hum category, as there really was no blockbuster news to write home about. For example, two of the most important news stories from the host company were simply official general availability releases of products announced months ago—VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services and updates to its Workspace ONE product. To be fair, there were a number of second-tier news items announced at the show, from VMware itself and its partners. Here is a list of take-home data points from VMworld 2017.

Dell EMC’s CEO said in his keynote that “customers are figuring out that cloud is not a place, it’s a way of doing IT. They’re modernizing, automating their existing on-premises infrastructure and also leveraging public cloud, managed services and software-as-a-service. VMware is incredibly well-positioned to enable that connected future and do it in a secure manner.”

Hybrid cloud infrastructure maker Stratoscale took home the VMworld 2017 Best of Show Gold Award in the Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure category for Stratoscale Symphony, a SaaS offering that helps manage data center transitions into hybrid cloud, unifying off-premises and on-premises environments.

New-gen authentication provider Okta released new tools to enable developers to build identity into every application. Okta’s offerings are similar way to the way Twilio enables communications and Stripe enables payments, but with broader applicability.

Talking security on the main stage, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger discussed the need for a three-pronged strategy to address cyber-threats. “First is to secure the infrastructure, build and architect the data. Second is to deeply architect the entire ecosystem … and then standardize those. Third, and the most important, is to turn to the basics: Every major breach in the last five years that made headlines happened because simple cyber-hygiene wasn’t followed somewhere.”

Lenovo introduced its ThinkAgile VX Series of servers, a preconfigured, hyper-converged infrastructure package engineered to provide businesses with simplified IT management powered by VMware vSAN. The VX series is the latest addition to Lenovo’s ThinkAgile portfolio of integrated appliances and systems.

NetScout demonstrated its nGenius and Arbor software packages that protect digital business against disruption, whether caused by performance, availability or security threats. The new products are designed to enable network, application and security professionals to accelerate digital transformation initiatives and become cloud-smarter.

Mellanox announced it is collaborating with VMware to increase the efficiency of storage systems, traditionally considered a bottleneck in most IT systems. The companies’ solution combines Mellanox iSER networking solutions, which use an Ethernet Storage Fabric as a unified connectivity solution for compute and storage, and VMware vSphere.

Liquidware showed the latest versions of its ProfileUnity, FlexApp and Stratusphere UX products. The company also previewed a significant update to its user experience monitoring and diagnostics solution, Stratusphere UX v6.0. The update includes scalability enhancements, a dashboard builder, support for new client devices and reporting for application virtualization and strategy with FlexApp layering.

ClearCube launched a new C3Pi Raspberry Pi 3 Thin Client, which the company touts as low-cost and virus-proof. C3Pi includes VMware Blast Extreme for virtual desktops and applications and delivers high-performance graphics and multimedia. It uses ClearCube’s Linux-based Cloud Desktop OS for optimized display and remote connection protocols out of the box.

Kingston Digital, flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Co., demonstrated the forthcoming DCU1000 2.5-inch U.2 NVMe PCIe solid-state drive. According to the company, the DCU1000 is now the industry’s fastest NVMe SSD for the U.2 form factor.