VMware have announced the extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy with the new VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture at their annual VMworld conference.
The update enables customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment.
VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger introduced the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture, promising customers the ability to manage, govern and secure applications running across public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud. In addition, VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation which offers a new “as a service” option that delivers the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment. Robert LeBlanc, SVP of IBM Cloud joined Gelsinger on stage as IBM is the first VMware vCloud Air Network partner to deliver the new offerings.
“We believe that all businesses who want to thrive must embrace being a ‘digital business,'” said Gelsinger. “Partners and customers want to engage with a mobile experience, and there is no longer a distinction between digital and traditional. The VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture is the strategy to run, manage, connect and secure apps in this all-digital world.”
The keynote concluded with Guido Appenzeller, chief technology strategy officer for networking and security at VMware, providing a tech preview of upcoming Cross-Cloud Services. These new SaaS offerings are under development but attendees got a first look from Appenzeller who provided a number of demos featuring discovery and analytics, compliance and security, and deployment and migration. The demos showcased how these offerings will allow central IT to protect data and applications and control costs while enabling developers and the businesses to innovate freely in the clouds they choose.
tHE Cross-Cloud Architecture enables consistent deployment models, security policies, visibility, and governance for all applications, running on-premises and off-premises, regardless of the underlying cloud, hardware platform or hypervisor. VMware’s Cross-Cloud Architecture builds on its leading private and hybrid cloud capabilities by offering customers the freedom to innovate in multiple clouds, and is delivered through VMware Cloud Foundation, a new set of Cross-Cloud Services which VMware is developing and the VMware vRealize cloud management platform.
Unified SDDC Platform for the Hybrid Cloud
VMware Cloud Foundation delivers the next-generation hyper-converged infrastructure for building private clouds that for the first time combines VMware’s highly scalable hyper-converged software with the world’s leading network virtualization platform, VMware NSX. VMware SDDC Manager, a core component of VMware Cloud Foundation, helps customers and service providers automate the deployment and management of VMware cloud software. SDDC Manager helps to build and maintain the entire VMware cloud software stack, freeing cloud administrators from the complex and tedious task of installing, configuring, managing and updating their cloud infrastructure, making it possible to build a complete cloud in a matter of hours. The result is that customers can gain a 6-8x reduction in time to deploy cloud infrastructure, and save 30-40 percent on TCO.
For the first time, VMware Cloud Foundation offers a new “as-a-service” option that delivers the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment. IBM is the first VMware vCloud Air Network partner delivering new offerings based on VMware Cloud Foundation with its VMware Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud offering. VMware Cloud Foundation will be available on additional public clouds, including vCloud Air, in the future.
For private clouds, customers can procure turnkey VxRack Systems integrated solutions from EMC today, or combine Cloud Foundation software with qualified VMware Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and QCT.
VMware Cloud Foundation runs any traditional or cloud-native application, from business-critical scale-up applications to distributed scale-out applications. Regardless of whether they are in virtual machines or containers, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a consistent infrastructure platform that delivers the unique performance, resiliency, security and manageability benefits of vSphere, Virtual SAN and VMware NSX.