At the end of June, VMware published the
VMworld 2018 US and
VMworld 2018 EU conference programs, which will be held in August and November, respectively. One of the key topics of the conference
is the creation of corporate blockchains on the VMware platform.
Under the cut, we’ll tell you why the company started working with distributed registries.
/ photo Pxhere PDWhy develop
VMware are actively involved in the development of infrastructure for blockchain technologies. Developers have been
working on this platform for more than a year. The company's goal is
to create the most secure, reliable and scalable blockchain platform for financial organizations.
Dahlia Malkhi, a researcher on the VMware Research team,
claims that the company has started working on the platform because there are many financial and government organizations among VMware customers who are planning to start working with blockchains. At the same time, the company has impressive experience in the development of distributed systems and contains a research department, on whose account there are a lot of publications and implemented projects on the topic.
VMware senior manager Mike DiPetrillo
said that the company seeks to simplify the process of implementing blockchain technologies for its customers as much as possible - to take over the organization of registry management, transaction security and scaling issues.
At a conference in August 2017, VMware researcher David Tennenhouse (David Tennenhouse)
said that the company is already working on a prototype platform for the exchange of digital currency. The release of the pilot version of the platform was scheduled for 2018. Tennenhaus stresses: "Blockchain can become a fundamentally new business area, and we believe that enterprises need innovative blockchain solutions."
About the platform
According
to Dalia Malkhi, the VMware solution is aimed at working with closed private blockchains. Therefore, to ensure consensus, they seek alternative solutions that do not necessarily use
proof-of-work principles, as is the case with Bitcoin.
According to representatives of the VMware research department, there are 2 main trends in the world: an increase in the number of cyber attacks and mass digitalization of data and business processes. To solve these two problems, in April 2018, VMware in its
study described the concept of scalable decentralized trust infrastructure (scalable decentralized trust infrastructure), a technology by which VMware implements a platform for creating corporate blockchains.
It is a distributed system that is resistant to the problem of Byzantine generals (byzantine fault tolerant -
BFT ): the system remains reliable even if it contains compromised or failed network nodes. When a group, for example, of financial organizations, forms a unified infrastructure of trust, it is able to implement smart contracts “on top” of the BFT system. At the same time, the smart contract execution environment (for example, Ethereum Virtual Machine - EVM) provides a
turing- level abstraction that monitors compliance with the terms of the “contract” and prevents DoS attacks.
VMware researchers tested this infrastructure by
conducting 1 million transactions based on real Ethereum workloads. The results showed that the system is capable of performing 50 transactions per second.
The company's senior manager, Mike Dipetrillo, also
added that VMware had already implemented a platform for creating blockchains within the company. The results of testing this system showed that a network of 500 nodes is capable of conducting 30 thousand transactions per second.
/ photo Pxhere PDOther VMware blockchain projects
The company also
works with Hyperledger Fabric, a hub project for developing corporate blockchains, which was created in the Linux Foundation community to popularize the blockchain. In July 2017, Hyperledger released their first solution - Hyperledger Fabric 1.0.
To work with it, VMware launched an auxiliary project - Blockchain on vSphere, which allows system administrators to deploy blockchain platform for developers based on the ESXi hypervisor. In our corporate blog, you can find a
step-by-step algorithm for implementing a blockchain project using Hyperledger Fabric and vSphere.
What's next
So far (before the US August conference), VMware did not disclose the exact release date of the platform for creating corporate blockchains. However, Mike Dipetrillo noted that everyone can follow the development progress on the
website of the VMware research department .
Dipetrillo also
said that blockchains are only the beginning of the development of “distributed trust systems”. Now the company is working on auxiliary solutions: distributed analytics systems, IoT interfaces, a
proof protocol
with zero disclosure .
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