VMworld global conference is currently underway in San Francisco and the company has made a number of announcements including the new and expanded cloud offerings designed to help customers meet the unique needs of traditional and modern applications.
The VMware Hybrid Cloud Platform enables companies to build, run, and manage workloads on a consistent infrastructure across their data centre, public cloud, or edge infrastructure of choice. This empowers customers to migrate and modernise applications across these environments while simplifying cloud planning, deployment, costs, and ongoing operations.
VMware Cloud delivers the hybrid cloud as a platform that spans all major public clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google, and IBM, and more than 60 VMware Cloud Verified partners worldwide. More than 70 million workloads run on VMware. Of these, 10 million are in the cloud in more than 10 000 data centres run by VMware Cloud providers.
“Hybrid cloud is giving every organisation the power to drive their businesses today, and the freedom to access incredible innovation for the future. Our hybrid cloud platform is resonating strongly with customers and these innovations will further accelerate our cloud leadership, as we deliver an unparalleled level of consistent infrastructure and operations, from the data centre to the cloud to the edge,” says Ian Jansen van Rensburg, Senior Systems Engineer at VMware.
The AWS cloud
VMware showcased how customers are adopting VMware Cloud on AWS to migrate and modernise their applications. It also unveiled new research that illustrates the financial benefits that can result from migrating to VMware Cloud on AWS.
VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service that brings the VMware enterprise-class software-defined data centre capabilities to AWS with optimised access. The service offers ultra-fast cloud migration, powered by VMware HCX and vMotion combined with consistent hybrid cloud infrastructure and operations.
“VMware Cloud on AWS is the easy button to migrate business-critical applications to the cloud, and research now shows that customers can also significantly lower infrastructure and ongoing operational cost by moving to the service.”
The research, commissioned to Forrester Consulting, showed the composite organisation (having 80 servers; 40 to 1 ratio of VMs to applications, $2 million annual software budget, and a three-year contract) saved 59 per cent of operational costs in the cloud, versus the equivalent capacity on-premises.
Cloud partners
Given the importance of the cloud, VMware announced new innovations across the VMware Cloud Provider Platform. These are designed to help cloud providers further expand their business opportunities in the new application economy.
These innovations will enable cloud providers to deliver industrialised hybrid clouds to customers from any location including customer data centres, cloud provider data centres, VMware Cloud on AWS as a managed service, and hyperscale public clouds. VMware’s expanded portfolio will also enable cloud providers to deliver new cloud services for differentiation and, in turn, potential revenue growth, and create clouds that are developer ready and support modern applications.
“Our Cloud Provider strategy is to empower our partners with the flexibility to deliver the industrialised hybrid cloud, built on a VMware software-defined data centre, from whatever location the customer chooses. The number of VMware Cloud Verified partners (a set of strategic partners offering a complete VMware SDDC as a service as well as value-added services) has quadrupled over the last year to more than 60 worldwide.”
Digital workforce
VMware also introduced several innovations to its VMware Workspace ONE digital workspace platform. This environment is designed to help companies engage employees from the moment they sign their offer letter, and to unleash productivity to grow, expand, and transform their business.
The new modern management, security and multi-cloud VDI innovations will allow IT teams to leverage the power of automation to intelligently manage and secure access to any app, on any cloud, delivered to any device.
“Addressing employee experience holistically must be at the heart of every company’s digital workspace design and is paramount to workforce transformation success. With Workspace ONE, IT can more confidently empower employees to be productive by providing access to the resources they need while simultaneously advancing the organisation’s modern management and zero-trust security initiatives.”
As part of this, VMware unveiled VMware Horizon Services for Multi-Cloud. This will enable IT administrators to automate brokering and management across multi-site environments. Allowing employees to log into the optimal virtual workspace, VMware Horizon Services for Multi-Cloud are designed to improve user performance, drive down costs, and support a range of use cases including disaster recovery, data centre expansion and cloud bursting.
Furthermore, the company showcased the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services that will transform the way enterprises build, run, and manage software on Kubernetes. This included a technology preview of Project Pacific, focused on transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform in a future release, and VMware Tanzu Mission Control, a single point of control from which customers will manage all their Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they run.
Leveraging the GPU
Also announced at VMworld, NVIDIA and VMware announced their intent to deliver accelerated GPU services for VMware Cloud on AWS. This will power modern enterprise applications, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data analytics workflows. These services will enable customers to migrate VMware vSphere-based applications and containers to the cloud, unchanged, where they can be modernised to take advantage of high-performance computing, machine learning, data analytics, and video processing applications.
Across industries, enterprises are implementing machine learning applications such as image and voice recognition, advanced financial modelling, and natural language processing using neural networks that rely on NVIDIA GPUs for faster training and real-time inference. Additionally, VMware recently acquired Bitfusion, which enables VMware to efficiently make GPU capabilities available for AI and machine learning workloads in the enterprise.
“Our customers are embracing the unique value of VMware Cloud on AWS to accelerate the migration and modernisation of business-critical applications. Through new innovations driven by partnerships we have with industry leaders such as NVIDIA and AWS, we will bring best-in-class GPU acceleration services for the most intense data-driven workloads and modern applications across the hybrid cloud,” Ian concludes.
Edited by Fundisiwe Maseko
Follow Fundisiwe Maseko on Twitter
Follow IT News Africa on Twitter
