Johannesburg, 04 May 2018
VMware recently unveiled an expanded portfolio of cloud services and announced that VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in Europe. The announcements are key to the company's stated strategy to play a fundamental role in enabling customers to work seamlessly with, and better manage and secure, hybrid clouds. This will in turn provide local VMware users the opportunity to marry multiple clouds, manage them from a single interface, develop for them, secure them, derive quantifiable analytics on use and behaviour, as well as leverage more effective cost analysis.
With the news of VMware Cloud on AWS now being available in Europe, the company is providing new capabilities to accelerate and simplify enterprise cloud migration and hybrid cloud deployments. Additionally, the company said VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will also enable system integrator and system outsourcer (SISO) partners, managed service providers, and solutions providers to grow their cloud business with VMware Cloud on AWS, helping their customers realise the full benefits of hybrid cloud.
According to Ian Jansen van Rensburg, senior systems engineering manager at VMware sub-Saharan Africa, while we do not have AWS data centres or local cloud infrastructure in South Africa, except for the VMware Cloud Provider Programme, partners who are today the champions driving local cloud adoption for VMware, there are many customers that make use of AWS together with VMware, if they are not forced by legislation to keep the data inside the boundaries of South Africa.
The expansion of its cloud services come (as per the company) as a direct result for a need to better help customers manage the complexity and risk of multiple cloud environments while extending consistent IT operations from the data centre to the cloud, which the company has identified as a growing need among its local customer base.
"Customers are focused on digital transformation and that is a business decision on how they leverage cloud," states Jansen van Rensburg. "The needs of applications is driving these cloud decisions as customers need to support both new and existing applications, which is conversely also driving massive cloud adoption, even locally.
"What is important with our recent announcements is that VMware Cloud is unique in the sense that you can develop any type of application and deliver these applications to any cloud and deliver to any device. All of this can be done while having a consistent infrastructure across cloud environments. This provides the customers the flexibility they need when using multiple cloud environments, as well as a way in which they can better mitigate the security risks involved in doing this."
He adds that while, 20 years ago, VMware transformed the way the data centre is operated, he believes it inadvertently laid the foundation on how we build cloud environments today. VMware Cloud Services are designed to give customers the flexibility to leverage any cloud environment while providing consistent operations for how clouds are managed and secured. VMware's growing portfolio of Cloud Services provides visibility, operations, automation, security and governance across any cloud.
"VMware's focus is to break down obstacles and barriers for customers and deliver the ultimate hybrid cloud. VMware wants to help customers overcome the complexities of today's multi-cloud world by keeping on driving innovation," he adds.
As businesses expand their use of cloud computing and utilise multiple cloud providers, they naturally experience increased complexity and risk associated with diverse infrastructures, management tools, and processes. VMware estimates that nearly two-thirds of the industry will utilise two or more cloud service providers in addition to their on-premises data centres. (Source: VMware Cloud Market Study, January, 2018)
The full announcement includes:
* New VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension Service for Private Cloud: A SaaS offering that provides application mobility and infrastructure hybridity across different vSphere versions, on-premises and in the cloud. Previously announced Hybrid Cloud Extension services for both IBM Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS are now available, and VMware has now added a new service for self-managed private enterprise data centres. Hybrid Cloud Extension provides the operational support that enables enterprises to complete large-scale workload movement in environments spanning multiple private data centre locations. Hybrid Cloud Extension enables enterprises to manage secure application migration without modification, with little or no application downtime, and across heterogeneous VMware vSphere environments. Cloud migration is simplified by eliminating the need to replatform, retest, or change cloud tooling, all while maintaining business continuity, application uptime, network architectures, and performance. With the general availability of Hybrid Cloud Extension for both IBM Cloud and VMware Cloud on AWS, customers can also extend their VMware-based environments to the public cloud for on-demand capacity and geographical expansion.
* Expanded Wavefront by VMware Service: This SaaS-based, high-scale, metrics monitoring and analytics platform supports cloud-native and enterprise applications, and both public and private cloud infrastructure, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, workloads running on Azure, and now VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware has added 45 new Wavefront integrations, including GCP, Chef, GitHub, Spark, Nginx+, and Mesos, in addition to already supported integrations such as AWS Lambda, Kafka, and Docker, expanding the set of information that can be unified, visualised and monitored by Wavefront, helping customers better optimise applications and deliver more compelling reporting and dashboards for dynamic applications. Wavefront now supports Kubernetes in Pivotal Container Service (PKS), application platform services such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), and enterprise applications running on VMware-based private clouds. Wavefront also now integrates with VMware vRealize Operations, empowering IT to partner with lines of business and application owners by providing rapid onboarding of Wavefront, agent life cycle management and control, and shared visibility not only of the infrastructure, but also for the applications that run on top. Wavefront is free to try at www.wavefront.com/sign-up.
* New VMware Log Intelligence Service: The newest offering for VMware Cloud Services, Log Intelligence will deliver deep operational insights into VMware-based data centres and VMware Cloud on AWS. Log Intelligence provides rapid IT troubleshooting and centralised log management across multiple clouds including VMware Cloud on AWS. Log Intelligence uses machine learning algorithms and real-time log analytics to continuously scan for anomalies in data centre and cloud environments. The service delivers high-performance log search and rich dashboards to give IT unified visibility into application behaviour and the health of underlying infrastructure.
* Expanded VMware Cost Insight Service: Adding to the existing support for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and VMware private cloud data centres, Cost Insight now delivers detailed assessments for migrating workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS, calculating the capacity and the cost of running apps in private or public clouds. Cost Insight offers a deep understanding into the true cost of migration through integration with VMware Network Insight, giving IT a more accurate view of the total cost of an app, including the estimates on network egress and storage IOPS costs post migration. Cost Insight offers an array of savings recommendations, alerts, and reporting capabilities, including the ability to set cost thresholds to manage costs and maintain budget.
Visit VMware at the ITWeb Security Summit and ask us all of your security-related questions. The ITWeb Security Summit is southern Africa's definitive conference and expo for information security, IT and business professionals. This year, over 70 expert speakers will deliver key insights across seven tracks, including workshops and training courses during the expanded five-day event. The ITWeb Security Summit will be staged at Vodacom World, Midrand, from 22-23 May 2018; and CTICC Cape Town on 29 May 2018. Focused and interactive workshops, as well as in-depth training courses, will be run in the days around the main conference and exhibition.
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