LAS VEGAS – As a company that has been boldly trumpeting a “cloud, mobile, and security” mantra, VMware Inc. revealed more details around its cross-cloud architecture strategy and the goal of transforming organizations into becoming “digital businesses.”
Onstage, CEO Pat Gelsinger noted its “cross-cloud” framework targets enterprises looking at becoming a “digital business” by giving customers the ability to manage, govern and secure applications running across public clouds, including Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.
Building on its vCloud Air platform, the new VMware Cloud Foundation offering is essentially a unified software-defined data centre (SDDC) platform that integrates the vSphere and NSX network virtualization and management frameworks to help users run and connect computing workloads regardless of the cloud service employed; according to VMware this enables organizations to quickly and seamlessly migrate business applications from on-premises data servers to a public cloud environment. Pricing was not disclosed at press time.
VMware’s legacy virtualization solutions have traditionally been about extending a computer to simultaneously manage multiple operating systems. According to Gelsinger, it’s no longer about distinguishing between a traditional business versus a digital one. It’s an “all-digital” world and VMware’s approach lies around making it easier to manage, deploy, and secure applications in this environment.
When it comes to the public cloud, Gelsinger conceded that cloud adoption has some ways to go in terms of attaining critical mass but offered that by 2030, public cloud should represent 50 per cent of computing workloads.
Dell: Business as usual for VMware customers
Dell CEO Michael Dell joined Gelsinger on stage to outline how the Round Rock, Tex-based company’s US$67-billion-dollar purchase of EMC — parent of VMware — will play out once the expected deal closes.
As the chief executive of the newly rebranded Dell Technologies, he noted that under the merger — pending regulatory approval from China — VMware will continue on its track that combines compute, networking and storage under a converged infrastructure framework.
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VMware also announced a partnership with IBM Corp. that simplifies and speeds the process around implementing and deploying a VMware SDDC infrastructure.
Working with more than 500 customers, VMware and IBM said they are presently working together to help users extend VMware workloads from on-premises environments to the cloud without incurring the cost and risk associated with retooling operations, re-architecting applications and re-designing security policies.
According to IDC research analyst Melanie Posey, IBM and VMware working together bodes well for users seeking to extend and migrate existing workloads to the cloud without having to revamp their existing IT infrastructure.
The VMware Cloud Foundation platform, which integrates VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN, VMware NSX and VMware SDDC Manager, enables customers to quickly provision pre-configured VMware SDDC environments on IBM Cloud.