VMware Unveils Cloud Foundation, Launches With IBM

VMware has launched what it hopes will be its saviour in public cloud this week, as more and more customers are turning over their data to companies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Announced at VMworld 2016, VMware has unveiled Cloud Foundation, a collective of cloud services that it claims will help businesses run their workloads across their own data centres, data centres run by VMware, and even on public clouds like AWS.

VMware officially billed Cloud Foundation as a “unified Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) platform that makes it easy for customers to manage and run their clouds”.

‘Daunted’

“Customers are increasingly relying on multiple public and private clouds to run their applications, but are daunted by the challenge of managing and securing applications across diverse cloud platforms,” said Raghu Raghuram, executive vice president at VMware.

“When customers combine a best-in-class private cloud with leading public clouds, all enabled by VMware, they have the strongest, most flexible hybrid cloud strategy. VMware is delivering cloud freedom and control by providing a common operating environment for all clouds with our unique Cross-Cloud Architecture.”

At the heart of a SDDC strategy lies the ability to retool data centres based on operational needs. To that end, VMware said its Cloud Foundation utilises the full VMware NSX virtualisation platform, along with vSphere and VirtualSAN.

And this is where VMware hopes to win some business. Many organisations already use VMware technology, and for those looking to progress to a cloud outside of their organisation, the Cloud Foundation on-ramp could be an easy way to do that, while still using VMware products.

Cloud Foundation will launch first with IBM’s public cloud, and will hit up other clouds later, said VMware.

“IBM and VMware share a common vision for providing customers with an easy path from the data centre to the cloud,” said Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO. “This collaboration has been so successful that we’re investing more deeply so our customers can quickly deploy software-defined solutions in just hours to IBM Cloud with all the sophisticated workload automation they have within their own data centres.”

Prices were not revealed by VMware, but the company said the product is due to launch later this quarter.

Take our cloud in 2016 quiz here!