VMware's Cross-Cloud Services Aims To Tie Largest Providers Together
VMware has developed new SaaS-based tools that will enable organizations to bridge applications and workloads across multiple private clouds including Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and the Google Cloud Platform. The company's new VMware Cross-Cloud services provide deployment, security and management of applications that can be shared across multiple clouds.
Cross-Cloud services are among a number of new technologies and offerings VMware is introducing this week at its annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas to provide extended hybrid cloud infrastructures and to showcase advances in software-defined networking, storage and end user computing.
Emphasizing hybrid clouds on the first day of the event, the company also introduced its VMware Cloud Foundation, which brings together its vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN offerings into hyper-converged systems integrated with VMware SDDC Manager. The new VMware Cloud Foundation will integrate with the IBM Cloud.
While the VMware Cloud Foundation extends the company's core virtualization and SDDC technologies to private and hybrid clouds, the new Cross-Cloud services target existing and new customers with a SaaS-based offering that doesn't require existing VMware infrastructure, company officials said. Demonstrated as a technology preview, VMware officials didn't say when it will offer the service.
The preview of VMware Cross-Cloud Services is the company's latest effort to extend its core virtualization expertise into a virtual cloud provider beyond its core vCloud Air offering. The VMware Cross-Cloud services are SaaS components that will tie together cloud usage and costs for IT professionals running multiple applications and processes in hybrid on-premises environments that are busting workloads across multiple public cloud providers, allowing for the use of their native APIs.
"Cross-Cloud services are truly a breakthrough through innovation that only this ecosystem can deliver," said VMware CEO Pat Gellsinger, in the opening keynote. Despite numerous providers of multi-cloud management wares, Gellsinger added at a press briefing that he believes VMware can provide better managed and secure services because of its history with virtualization and its software-defined datacenter expertise. "We think VMware is uniquely positioned in industry to be a neutral provider of those services," he said.
The company didn't say when it will release the new offering but said the first capabilities the tools previewed offer include discovery and analytics to enable onboarding and governance of public cloud applications; compliance and securing using "micro-segmentation" and monitoring for cross-cloud governance and tools to enable deployment and migration for developers to build across public clouds.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 08/29/2016 at 10:42 AM