News

VMware Highlights Cloud Building Blocks During Keynote

Cloud Foundation, Cross-Cloud Services are featured.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 08/29/2016

LAS VEGAS -- 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-Services provide deployment, security and management of applications and that can be shared across multiple clouds.

Cross-Cloud Services was introduced this morning during CEO Pat Gelsinger’s keynote presentation that kicked off VMworld 2016.  The keynote’s purpose was to provide extended hybrid cloud infrastructures and to showcase advances in software-defined networking, storage and end user computing. In the hybrid cloud arena, the company also introduced its VMware Cloud Foundation, which brings together its vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN offerings into hyper-converged systems integrated with its 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-Services offering targets 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. Cross-Cloud Services are SaaS components that tie together cloud usage and costs for IT professionals running multiple applications and processes in hybrid on-premises environments; they service 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," Gelsinger said in his keynote. Despite numerous providers of multi-cloud management wares, Gelsinger 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 the 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 security via micro-segmentation; and monitoring for cross-cloud governance and tools, to enable deployment and migration for developers to build across public clouds.