vSphere - Cloud OS from vmware

VMware announced on Tuesday its cloud operating system--dubbed vSphere 4--with plans for general availability in the second quarter.

With the effort, VMware is attempting to bridge virtualized data centers--now known as "private clouds"--and growing cloud computing services from the likes of Amazon.com and others. However, this bridging process is a work in progress due to the lack of standards. VMware's big pitch is that vSphere can run your data center and allow you to bridge out when external resources are needed.

In the meantime, VMware has packed these key features into vSphere 4:

• A 30 percent increase in application consolidation ratios.
• Up to 50 percent in storage savings by allowing virtual machines to only use storage as needed.
• Up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings.
• One more significant feature of vSphere is Fault tolerance.
• vSphere 4 scales better with the ability to pool 32 physical servers with up to 2,048 processor cores, 1,280 virtual machines, 32 terabytes of RAM, 16 petabytes of storage, and 8,000 network ports.

-Abhishek