This week’s biggest highlight by far was VMworld, one of the most popular trade shows in the industry. The big emphasis this year was on the software-driven data center and simplicity, and both VMware and the other vendors that exhibited at the event managed to deliver big time.

VMware itself debuted the newest version of vSphere. The complicated and fairly detested vRAM-based pricing model has been taken out of the loop, and the web-based client for the software has replaced the Windows version.  V5.1 centralizes backup and replication for the first time, and doesn’t require customers to buy a Windows license if they happen to be running Linux.

Simplicity is also the key selling point of the Horizon Suite, VMware’s new BYOD management solution. It’s comprised of what is formally known as Project Octopus and a few other VMware projects.  Octopus, or Horizon Data as it’s now called, aims to offer a more enterprise-ready alternative to Dropbox.

One of the other more interesting developments from the event was the launch of Simplivty, a startup that offers special appliances touted as data center ‘building blocks’.  The OmniCube includes compute, storage and networking and more blocks can very easily be added to an deployment thanks to the solution’s scale-out architecture.

Horizon Data’s biggest consumer-grade competitor also had an update this week. Dropbox rolled out a new mobile authentication service that can be toggled off and when active, asks the user for not only their e-mail address and password but also a unique code that gets sent to their phone.

The last major development this week comes from Rackspace. The cloud host acquired an up-and-coming startup called Mailgun, which developed a service that makes it easier for developers to integrate e-mail capabilities into OpenStack.