Broadcom Inc. announced latest capabilities for its VMware Cloud Foundation or VCF private cloud platform at this week’s VMware Explore 2024 in Barcelona, specializing in the corporate’s deal with the growing adoption of artificial intelligence, national digital sovereignty and cyber resilience.
These aspects have also been causing corporations to reevaluate their cloud strategies. Many chief information officers have told me they’ve been looking to enhance their broader cloud strategies with more use of personal cloud and, in some cases, bringing workloads back from an “as a service” model to a personal model, which offers more control.
The corporate also introduced ecosystem partnerships and modernization programs designed to speed up the event of generative AI apps, cybersecurity initiatives and sovereign cloud adoption.
It’s essential to grasp the nuances of VCF. Even though it’s called “private cloud,” it doesn’t mean on-premises only, as customers can deploy the private cloud in their very own data center, at the sting or in a public cloud. Krish Prasad (pictured), Broadcom senior vice chairman and general manager of the VCF Division, summed this up when he stated the corporate is “enabling private cloud in every single place” with VCF. He then mentioned the brand new capabilities when he said Broadcom is “unlocking the promise of AI within the enterprise, delivering latest levels of organizational resilience, and supporting the privacy and digital sovereignty demands” of world customers.
Within the analyst briefing last week, Mark Chuang, senior director for Broadcom’s VCF division, said the corporate is “rolling out continuous innovation in areas which might be top of mind for patrons,” especially AI and cyber resiliency.
Chuang added that Broadcom is constructing out its private cloud platform to supply customers latest ways to acquire resiliency and alternative. He said the goal is to assist customers “achieve faster time to value” in 3 ways:
- Gaining an accurate understanding of their current situation
- Accelerating deployment
- Ensuring information technology teams have the essential training to execute
Fast ROI for patrons
“Based on data gathered from deployed VCF customers, we see a 10-month payback period on their investment, as much as 34% lower infrastructure costs and 61% faster deployment time for brand new workloads,” Chuang said. “And in the case of resolving data loss incidences, we’re seeing reports of 66% faster recovery and determination.”
Technology and vision are essential, however the actual value of any solution is how well it delivers customer results. One Broadcom VCF customer seeing solid results from its deployments is ABN AMRO. The third-largest Dutch bank faced rapidly changing customer expectations. Chuang said customers want more value-based services from their banks.
“This implies a shift away from just standard checking and savings accounts to more personalized self-service banking experiences and support, he said. “The bank felt tied down by the complexity of its legacy technology environment. Following extensive evaluation, ABN AMRO decided to construct a personal cloud platform based on VCF and move away from their previous managed service.”
“ABN AMRO wanted to realize greater control over its environment, breaking freed from the constraints of its existing, costly, rigid agreement, getting robust management capabilities, and ultimately being free to run apps anywhere without the complexity of an application rewrite,” Chuang explained. “The impact they’ve seen is developers are having fun with the advantages of an automatic service catalog and improved test tooling in sandboxes. Ultimately, the bank is taking back ownership of its technology. It’s now in a much stronger position to deliver higher services to their customers at speed.”
VMware is capable of achieve these results by delivering VCF as a turnkey, validated solution. It is a playbook the corporate has used repeatedly before, dating back to the “VCE” joint solution with Cisco Systems Inc. and EMC Corp. When a customer is required to assemble a posh solution, there may be at all times weeks and even months of tweaking and tuning time. The validated design removes much of the guesswork.
VMware Tanzu Data Services for VCF
Broadcom also announced a brand new advanced service — VMware Tanzu Data Services — “to streamline deployment, management and consumption of critical data services and enable faster application delivery, higher data security and governance, and operational efficiency.” The corporate said the info services offer “a contemporary approach to store, manage and process data,” which addresses the challenges faced when deploying microservices, serverless and other modern application architectures at scale.
Enhancements to cyber resilience, security and recovery
The corporate can be introducing VMware Live Recovery, which is able to support Google Cloud VMware Engine as an isolated recovery environment for VCF workloads for cyber and disaster recovery. This extends Live Recovery’s protection of GCVE sites as a source while enabling a “consistent, secure and simplified” experience for shielding VMware workloads running on-premises or within the cloud to GCVE.
Expanding the reach of gen AI services with VMware Private AI
With generative AI fast becoming a business necessity, Broadcom is extending its Private AI technique to support Microsoft’s Azure AI Video Indexer on VMware Private AI running on VCF and Azure VMware Solution. That is one other example of Broadcom’s commitment to helping customers speed up their time-to-value for AI projects on VCF while enabling the Azure AI Video Indexer to run anywhere no matter cloud deployment model.
Continuing private cloud modernization
Broadcom also announced additional investments in its Private Cloud Modernization Program, which helps customers navigate the journey to non-public cloud with VCF. The corporate introduced two latest capabilities:
- VMware Cloud Foundation Architect Certification is designed for people who can “conceptualize and design VCF solutions that fulfill each business and technical requirements.” Along with validating an architect’s skill for designing systems that include key features akin to availability, manageability, performance, recoverability and security, it also highlights the importance of capability planning, disaster recovery, and scalability.
- Private Cloud Maturity and Optimization Tool for Partners empowers partners to assist their customers realize the numerous advantages of personal cloud as they move forward with private clouds. Partners now have access to the Private Cloud Framework, an assessment resulting in a Private Cloud Maturity Index Rating for his or her customers, and prescriptive guidance from Broadcom. The corporate says that by leveraging the model, partners can “speed up customers’ outcomes, deliver strategic account plans faster and develop and deliver latest services.”
Partners support national digital sovereignty
Broadcom announced that fifty VMware Cloud Service Providers now offer sovereign cloud services based on VCF, including 30 in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Sovereign VCSP partners meet Broadcom’s requirements for location operations by a legal entity that “owns, operates and manages the sovereign cloud offering with complete jurisdictional control, local data residency and portability without lock-in.”
VCF includes specific capabilities that address sovereign cloud requirements, starting from privacy-enhancing computation support with Intel and AMD chipsets (confidential computing); integrated data-at-rest protection with vSAN Encryption; Secure Boot for ESXi Hosts and vSphere virtual machine encryption; comprehensive data services and compliance monitoring, alerting and reporting with VCF Operations.
Broadcom said VCSP sovereign clouds also support Bring Your Own Keys, which provides customers with “much more confidence that nobody else, not even the CSP, can view or access their information without permission.”
Why all of it matters
That’s a number of news from Broadcom and its VMware unit on several key fronts. But within the fast-moving worlds of AI, cloud services and security, the businesses that succeed will probably be the primary movers that supply the broadest, most dear services.
Broadcom has been selective regarding the parts of the VMware business it supports and invests in. Private cloud is an area that Broadcom appears to be “all in” on, because it favors a broad platform approach. AI will proceed to drive customers to non-public clouds, and we’re within the very early stages of this wave. VMware customers should expect to see continued investment on this area from Broadcom.
Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this text for SiliconANGLE.
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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