House of Brick Principal Architect
While attending the SQL PASS Summit conference a few weeks ago, VMware Corporation quietly announced an update to one of my favorite products, vFabric Data Director. As soon as it goes GA in a week or two, it will now be supporting SQL Server and Hadoop!
First, if you are unfamiliar with the vFabric Data Director product, please reference one of my earlier blog posts to bring you up to speed.
vFabric Data Director (VFDD) will now support SQL Server 2008R2 and SQL Server 2012, as well as Hadoop-based distributions Apache Hadoop 1.0, Cloudera CDH3, Greenplum HD 1.1 and 1.2, and Hortonworks HDP-1.
To my colleagues and me at House of Brick, this product release is one of the largest of the year. In my eyes, using vCloud Director and VFDD in a pre-production role will dramatically increase the agility and speed of development in a larger development shop.
To me, this product–in conjunction with vCloud Director (for cloning and managing presentation and compute layers)–makes up two of the chief components of a solid 21st century software lifecycle platform. VMware has a good product suite around these and the other components in their inventory.
(Image Source: http://blogs.vmware.com/vfabric/files/2012/11/vFBRC-DATA-DIRECTOR_102-1024×510.png)
What VMware needs to do better is demonstrate how vCloud Director and VFDD are complementary products. I expressed this to VMware recently and was assured that they are working to meet in the middle between these two products.
To view a video of this new product in action, reference their blog post product announcement here.
I urge you to download the evaluation version and let your DBAs and developers experiment with these products. Between the Oracle and SQL Server integration in VFDD for the data tier, and the power of using vCloud Director for the middle and presentation tiers, your development efforts can be transformed!
