VMware Blockchain Debuts – Virtualization Review

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VMware Blockchain Debuts

VMware this week introduced a new blockchain offering, originally announced as a beta in 2018.

VMware Blockchain is now commercially available, designed to help organizations build business networks and deploy business-critical decentralized applications.

Decentralization is the key to blockchain, a fairly new, complicated, and multipurpose technology that leverages cryptography for its best-known use case: digital currency, often called bitcoin. However, in the corporate world, it has many more uses, providing a decentralized and distributed ledger created to record the provenance of a digital asset.

Indeed, it can be used to provide a “single source of truth” for business transactions, for example, through a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked – or chained together – using encryption.

Blockchains are resistant to changes in their data because the data in a given block cannot be changed retroactively without changing all subsequent blocks.

With its new offering, VMware is focusing on the financial sector, although blockchain is being used in other sectors as well.

“There is a wave of building new critical infrastructure for applications in financial services, the retail and manufacturing oriented supply chain and healthcare sectors that leverage blockchain technologies to help address pain points experienced with disconnected systems and isolated, ”VMware said in a press release. “For financial services firms, blockchain technologies radically streamline and simplify operations, enabling banks, broker-dealers, payment processors and other financial institutions to dramatically shorten processing times, reduce manual processing and duplicate payments. messages and create new profit centers with features such as clearing and settlement of simultaneous trades. ”

Since “blockchain capabilities can resemble sections of a computer science textbook,” VMware attempted to briefly describe the features of its new product in a November 18 blog post:

• State machine replication: “To ensure data consistency and resilience even in the most extreme failure scenarios, VMware Blockchain relies on the Byzantine replication of the fault tolerant state machine.”
• Privacy-authenticated key / value ledger: “In order to prove the facts about smart contracts on the platform and to allow access to a privacy-sensitive verifiable source of truth, VMware Blockchain stores the state of the blockchain in an authenticated key / value data structure.”
• Deep integration with DAML: “With this version of VMware Blockchain, we support DAML dApps by natively integrating the DAML interpreter as a state machine into the platform.”
• Enterprise-grade operational capabilities: “A constant challenge that customers have shared with us is that implementing and supporting blockchain platforms is difficult and complex. With VMware Blockchain, we reduce that complexity by leveraging the investment and familiarity that enterprise customers already have in their software infrastructure. -defined existing “.