VMware go deep into the cloud
In the past few years, both cloud services and platform virtualization have become the norm in IT departments. As a result, companies offering solutions to both of these needs are in high demand, which is why VMware’s announcements at VMworld this week are important, especially in a sector where more and more clients are looking for comprehensive solutions to bridge the gaps between private and public cloud systems. Here are the most important takeaways from the announcements.
The big picture
Much of what the new VMware announcements address are the three primary concerns of customers in this area: efficiency, security, and virualization/containerization.
Efficiency
As VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said himself, they want to offer “a fully-integrated system that just works.” This addresses a new concern that is confronting IT departments – with all the cloud service and container use, more interdependincies are creating compatibility clashes and longer implementation times. The advent of cloud services has brought IT a long way towards the “plug-and-play” landscape that companies have been crying out for, but the finer details of operating a hybrid cloud setup are still being ironed out. This is particularly relevant in the current multi-cloud environment that many companies find themselves in.
VMware are looking to be the company that addresses this most efficiently, being the glue that binds together the different services in a company’s IT stack.
Some of the announcements from the conference directly address this. VMware Cloud on AWS will be rolled out worldwide, giving customers a seamless single set of tools to manage both their Amazon Web Services infrastructure as well as the VMware infrstructure, all delivered on-demand.
Security
Several announcements also outlined how the company plans to foray into security. with a App Defense feature. While containers go a long way to eliminating some security threats, the new feature will actively monitor the behavior of individual virtual machines to flag up any suspicious behavior. In a world where high-profile data breaches and security threats have grabbed the attention of executives everywhere, this will add another dimension of appeal to VMware’s offerings.
Virualization/Containerization
As the company’s core business it is no surprise that they have announced more offerings and features to keep up with the best in class developments regarding virtualization and containers. The rise of Docker and other container technologies has of course injected new life into the infrastructure market.
Since the two types of technology are complementary, VMware have capitalized on some of these developments, including better integration with Kubernetes and Okata.
Announcements about VMware Integrated OpenStack and Pivotal Container Service are the two most notable releases in this regard.
Some of this week’s biggest announcements at VMworld 2017 include:
- NSX Cloud: offering on-demand cloud based NSX
- VMware Discovery: better overview of containers, virtual machines and how that matches up with your cloud infrastructure
- Wavefront: cloud-based app performance monitoring
- Network Insight: allows detailed security monitoring and analysis of NSX
- Cost Insight: an analysis tool to make better cloud-as-a-service cost decisions with advanced price calculations
With the product enhancements and the range of partnerships VMware have announced this week, the company are aiming to demonstrate that not only are they prepared for the future of multi-cloud, heavily virtualized and on-demand IT landscapes, they are actively seeking to take advantage of this and cement their role as the “glue” that bids it all together.
