Avaya had two announcements at the just-concluded VMworld 2012, unveiling new virtualization enhancements to its portfolio that build on the Avaya Collaborative Cloud, along with a new portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey solutions codenamed Avaya Collaboration Pods.
The Avaya Collaboration Pods represent a new portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey solutions designed to simplify installation and operations of real-time applications and collaboration environments. The new portfolio leverages elements from Avaya, EMC and VMware used to deliver virtualized storage, computing and networking that are optimized to meet performance requirements for collaboration and other real-time applications such as VDI.
Among the key components are storage arrays from EMC, VMware vCenter and VMware View from VMware; and networking, management, communications applications and integration from Avaya. Integrated management, orchestration and technical support, are also featured.
Avaya Collaboration Pods will be packaged in several configurations, and each package will include the Avaya Virtual Services Platform (VSP) 7000 Ethernet switching platform. Avaya Collaboration Pods are meant to more quickly provide a revenue-generating platform for smaller cloud providers who want to streamline delivery of high-value Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Communications as a Service (CaaS).
Commenting in a statement, Jean Turgeon, vice president of Technical Solutions Marketing, Avaya said, "Avaya Collaboration Pods will provide enterprise customers with a unique, cloud-ready portfolio of solutions that contains all the components they need to quickly establish and take advantage of advanced unified communications and collaboration applications. It builds on what Avaya refers to as application driven networking, giving customers a fast, easy path to the cloud without having to worry about the infrastructure."
Avaya also announced and displayed other enhancements at VMworld 2012 including:
• integrated support for VXLAN with Avaya VENA Fabric Connect, as well as interoperability with VXLAN on the new Avaya Collaboration Pods,
• Avaya Customer Experience Management applications
• AvayaLive Engage immersive web collaboration
• Hosted Avaya Notification Solution.