Mark Davison is at VMworld 2018 Europe in Barcelona – VMware has further strengthened its partnership with IBM with a host of announcements aimed at accelerating hybrid cloud adoption, as well as its first foray into the world of Watson, IBM’s AI offering.
The announcements at VMworld include a new IBM Services offering to help migrate and extend mission-critical VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud, and new integrations to help enterprises to modernise applications with Kubernetes and containers.
To date, the IBM and VMware partnership has helped more than 1 700 enterprises including Banca Carige and CNH Industrial adopt IBM Cloud for VMware solutions.
According to research from Ovum, while 20% of business processes have already moved to the cloud, 80% of mission-critical workloads and sensitive data are still running on-premises because of performance and regulatory requirements. Businesses need an open, hybrid cloud approach to developing, running and deploying applications in a multi-cloud environment. IBM and VMware are delivering new solutions to help enterprises accelerate hybrid cloud adoption without incurring the cost and risk typically associated with retooling operations, re-architecting applications and re-designing security policies.
Announced at VMworld, IBM is enabling a fully automated, highly available managed global cloud architecture for mission-critical VMware workloads designed to help enterprises prevent downtime for cloud applications and automate failovers within an IBM Cloud region. This architecture will be managed by IBM Services and can be deployed across IBM Cloud’s 18 availability zones in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Mission-critical workloads are defined as essential to the survival of the business and so critical that outages affect brand integrity. The IBM solution will support these workloads at a targeted aggregate availability of 99.99%, which is higher than many clients can currently achieve with on-premises environments. The solution includes IBM Cloud infrastructure, VMware software-defined data centre technologies, Intel Optane DC SSD and IBM Services that cover a variety of enterprise needs including networks, storage, resiliency and other tools built for monitoring and troubleshooting cloud applications.
Additionally, IBM and VMware announced new technology collaborations to help enterprises to modernise applications with containers regardless of whether they are deploying on-premises, in the private cloud or in the public cloud.
IBM Cloud Private Hosted can now be installed on VMware vCenter Server on IBM Cloud, which supports the management and orchestration of virtual machines and containers within a common security model and private network. With IBM Cloud Private Hosted on VMware vCenter Server, clients can containerise stateless components of a virtualised application while maintaining stateful components such as databases within the virtual machine. It also enables clients to modernise applications with the IBM Cloud Private catalogue of services including Blockchain, AI and event services, among many others.
In addition to IBM Cloud Private Hosted, IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions are now integrated with the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, which provides a fully managed Kubernetes environment so customers can concentrate on application development.
To provide a unified networking solution that will bridge IBM Cloud Private and the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, IBM is expanding use of virtual cloud networking with the adoption of VMware NSX-T Data Center. As the foundation for a software-based network architecture that delivers services to applications and data wherever they are located, NSX-T provides consistent networking and security for all deployment models, including VM, containerised and bare metal. NSX-T has been validated by IBM as a supported network stack for IBM Cloud Private.
To support on-premises workloads, VMware vRealize Operations is now available on IBM Power Systems. With VMware vRealize Operations for Power, IT managers can monitor a heterogenous infrastructure from a single dashboard, allowing them to more efficiently allocate resources and free them from the time-consuming process of switching between multiple tools to manage a sprawling infrastructure.
It was also announced that VMware will use Watson to help improve customer service across VMware support portals. Instead of static drop downs, now VMware customers can leverage Watson to quickly and easily communicate with the portal in natural language. Watson is designed to detect product type and version, analyse issues and match those issues with an expert engineer for faster resolution and a better customer support experience.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, and Arvind Krishna, IBM senior vice-president, Hybrid Cloud, announced on stage the formation of a Joint Innovation Lab with dedicated engineers that will bring even more game changing solutions and services.
“The VMware and IBM partnership builds upon the strengths of both companies,” says Gelsinger. “VMware is relied upon by virtually every large enterprise today, including 100% of the Fortune 100. Today these organisations can easily and securely extend these workloads into IBM’s global public cloud using Hybrid Cloud Extension for large-scale bulk migration and bi-directional application mobility. Now with the latest advancements in our relationship, we’re making it possible for customers to move, modernise and operate any application – VM or containerised, traditional or mission-critical – in the IBM Cloud.”