News

VMworld 2018: VMware Extends Edge Computing Strategy

• By David Ramel
• 08/28/2018

The Internet of Things (IoT) and network edge figured prominently in new announcements from VMware at its ongoing VMworld 2018 conference in Las Vegas.

Those technologies were interwoven throughout announcements on day one of the conference, and on Tuesday, more IoT news emerged.

The new announcements were framed by the company in the context of its broad effort to extend the VMware hybrid and multi-cloud environments to the edge.

"As the world of edge computing and IoT becomes more distributed, billions of connected devices require increasing levels of compute at the edge, which needs to be secured, managed and automated," the company said. "VMware will help customers by providing local intelligence and compute from the datacenter to the cloud to edge building on VMware's network edge investments."

Today, the company announced updated capabilities for VMware Pulse IoT Center 2.0, its IoT infrastructure management solution. Those capabilities, the company said, will provide broader management, smarter operations, quicker innovation and better security.

VMware Pulse IoT Center is consumable as either an on-premises or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, with the latter being hosted by VMware and partners participating in the VMware Cloud Provider Program. Also, RESTful APIs will be available to facilitate customer and partner integration and improve extensibility.

The company said additional features include:

• Low-touch enrollment and configuration capabilities.
• The ability to perform Gateway configuration through the action framework (sshd, turn on/off port, IP address table and so on), as well as provide complete firmware and BIOS updates for selected gateways, for deeper edge system management.
• Enhanced alerts and notifications including a new and improved alert system on individual managed object or group of managed objects notifications on alerts can now be received via email and SMS integration, or API into a third-party system.
• Enhanced over-the-air (OTA) updates that the company said give customers more granular control over OTA scheduling, activation, progress status, package type and failure handling.

Also, parent company Dell Technologies today announced its IoT Solution for Surveillance.

In a statement, Dell said this was an engineered, pre-integrated package solution, available later this year, that will be easy to deploy and manage, featuring hyper-converged software-defined technologies that the company said will transform and simplify how surveillance technology is delivered. Its site says it enhances surveillance technology to provide safety and is also applicable for use in large areas such as sports arenas and public areas where regulatory compliance is often required.

VMware noted that the bundled solution also includes VMware Pulse IoT Center and VMware Software-Defined Data Center to help gather and analyze data at the edge.

While the reference architecture for Dell's IoT Solution for Surveillance is available now, the engineered solution will be available in October 2018.

Dell also announced the upcoming Dell Technologies IoT Connected Bundles offering.

"The bundles include sensors and licensed software from partners tailored for specific customer use cases, together with various combinations of Dell Technologies infrastructure spanning edge gateway, embedded PC and server hardware," the company said. "This is in addition to complimentary software like VMware Pulse IoT Center for securing, managing and monitoring these solutions at scale."