VMware Unveils EVO: RAIL -- The Fastest Way to Build and

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 25, 2014) - Today at VMworld® 2014, VMware, Inc. ( NYSE : VMW ) introduced VMware EVO: RAIL ™, a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance that helps customers streamline the deployment and scale-out of Software-Defined IT infrastructure at the speed of business. VMware EVO: RAIL is the first solution in a family of hyper-converged infrastructure offerings from VMware.

IT organizations today are being challenged to provide services faster than ever while reducing the complexity and costs of their environments. VMware EVO: RAIL will dramatically simplify the delivery of software-defined infrastructure services while lowering operating expenses. Featuring an integrated 100 percent VMware software stack, VMware EVO: RAIL will accelerate customer time to value by enabling them to produce virtual machines within minutes of powering on the appliance.

In conjunction with Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Inspur, Net One Systems Co. and Supermicro, VMware will streamline the purchase and deployment of this hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. VMware EVO: RAIL will be offered by partners as a single SKU covering hardware, software, and support and services costs, with partners offering single point-of-contact support. With broad support from its partners at launch, customers will have a wide range of systems vendors from which to purchase VMware EVO: RAIL.

Read what partners are saying about VMware EVO: RAIL

"Customers expect IT solutions to deliver immediate value -- not in days, weeks or months," said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president, Software-Defined Data Center Division, VMware, Inc. "VMware EVO: RAIL is a new building block for software-defined data center environments, taking the guesswork out of building, deploying, scaling and managing software-defined infrastructure services. With the help of our partners, we are bringing the simplicity of consumer appliances to the world of enterprise infrastructure."

VMware EVO: RAIL -- From Power-On to Virtual Machines in Minutes A new building block for the software-defined data center, VMware EVO: RAIL will deliver integrated compute, network, storage and management software that enables customers to rollout and scale-out software-defined infrastructure services in a rapid and repeatable fashion. The hyper-converged infrastructure appliance will feature a pre-tested, pre-integrated 100 percent VMware software stack optimized for a 2U/4-Node hardware platform.

The VMware EVO: RAIL software will include VMware vSphere®, VMware Virtual SAN™, VMware vCenter™ Log Insight™, and the new EVO: RAIL engine -- all integrated with hardware from customers' preferred vendor. VMware EVO: RAIL will simplify appliance deployment, configuration as well as on-going management, patching and upgrading of the software. The appliance will feature a new intuitive user interface that will streamline previously manual processes of creating and managing virtual machines, along with the associated networks and datastores. Customers will be able to achieve operation cost savings through increased efficiency from:

• fast time-to-value resulting in virtual machines in minutes;
• automatic scale out of the VMware EVO: RAIL appliances;
• zero-downtime patching and updates of all VMware software; and,
• simple virtual machine lifecycle management.

A simple to consume appliance, VMware EVO: RAIL will enable customers to start with a single appliance of four nodes and scale out to four appliances for a total of 16 nodes (in this initial release) as IT infrastructure needs grow. New appliances added to an existing VMware EVO: RAIL cluster will be automatically discovered -- requiring a few mouse clicks to get started. A single appliance will support approximately 100 general purpose virtual machines or 250 virtual desktop virtual machines and will feature a VMware Virtual SAN datastore with a capacity of ~13 TB ¹ . VMware EVO: RAIL will scale linearly to offer customers predictability in design, performance and cost.

VMware EVO: RAIL is aimed at use cases in the mid-market and enterprise segments. With VMware Virtual SAN as key enabling software, VMware EVO: RAIL is ideally suited for use cases such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as well as remote office/branch office for industries such as financial services, government -- federal, healthcare, higher education, insurance, oil and gas, and retail. Based on VMware vSphere , the appliance can co-exist with customers' existing VMware vSphere environments as well as serve as an on-ramp to VMware vCloud® Air ™ (formerly known as VMware vCloud® Hybrid Service™).

What Early Adopter Program Participants Have to Say

• "My team's mandate in the State of Michigan is provide direct physical critical infrastructure support, around the clock to State employees and facilities. By leveraging this technology we believe it can make us more nimble and also raise us to a whole new level of freedom from the traditional, support intensive architecture. We believe that this bold new technology will put us well on our way to providing the State of Michigan with the most flexible, affordable, and sustainable centralized control environment available today." - Steven M. Sebastian, Central Control Supervisor, Department of Technology Management and Budget (DTMB)
• "With more than 35,000 students and 5,000 staff members, Oakland Unified School District's IT needs require the ability to rapidly scale to meet new curriculum and organizational demands. The ability for our infrastructure to scale and meet our application needs is critical. VMware EVO: RAIL will help us deliver new levels of responsiveness to our students and the staff. What really resonates with our team is how fast and easy VMware EVO: RAIL is to install and begin creating virtual machines." - John Krull, Information Technology Officer, Oakland Unified School District , Technology Services
• "We currently have over 40,000 VMware virtual machines running at Rackspace. We were very pleased with the results we experienced in VMware's Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance Early Adopter Program. VMware EVO: RAIL opens up a new and exciting opportunity to serve our customers." - Pranav Parekh, Product Manager, Managed Virtualization, Rackspace

Technology Preview: EVO: RACK Today at VMworld 2014, VMware also revealed a new technology preview of VMware EVO: RACK™, a hyper-converged infrastructure project. The technology in EVO: RACK is designed to dramatically simplify how companies buy, deploy, and operate software-defined data centers helping enterprises rapidly provision applications and services at data center scale. VMware EVO: RACK will be built to run on a range of pre-integrated hardware configurations ranging from Open Compute Project-based hardware designs to industry-standard OEM servers and converged infrastructure.

Pricing and Availability VMware EVO: RAIL is expected to be available from partners starting in the second half of 2014. The hyper-converged infrastructure appliance including hardware, software and support will be made available for purchase via a single SKU on partner price books. Pricing will be provided by the VMware EVO: RAIL partners.

Additional Resources

• Go to VMware Now to watch a live stream of the VMworld 2014 Keynote today 9:00 a.m. PT
• Go to the VMworld 2014 Online Press Kit
• Read " Meet VMware EVO:RAIL -- A New Building Block for your SDDC ," blog post by Duncan Epping, Chief Technologist, Emerging Solutions Group, VMware
• Read " EVO: RACK Tech Preview at VMworld 2014 ," blog post by Raj Yavatkar, Fellow at VMware
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

About VMware VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and based on their specific needs. With 2013 revenues of $5.21 billion, VMware has more than 500,000 customers and 75,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com .

VMware, VMware vSphere, vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware EVO: RACK, VMware vCloud Director, VMware Virtual SAN, VMware vCenter Log Insight and VMware EVO: RAIL are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding new VMware products and services, including VMware EVO: RAIL and VMware EVO: RACK, expected features of the new products, potential benefits to customers, expected availability and pricing and broad partner support for the new products, including the wide range of vendors offering the new products. These forward-looking statements are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the and cloud computing market, and new product and marketing initiatives by our competitors; (iv) our customers' ability to develop, and to transition to, new products and computing strategies such as cloud computing, network virtualization, and software defined data center; (v) the uncertainty of customer acceptance of emerging technology; (vi) rapid technological and market changes in virtualization software and cloud computing; (vii) changes to product development timelines; (viii) VMware's ability to protect its proprietary technology; (ix) VMware's ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees, and (ix) global economic conditions. These forward looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including VMware's most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K that VMware may file from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this press release.

¹ VMware vSphere Virtual SAN datastore size may vary per VMware EVO: RAIL partner system