Kathy Gibson reports from VMware Explore – When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), the platform and technology are important – but the data is paramount.
“There are a lot of challenges involved in bringing AI models on-premise,” says Chris Wolf, vice-president: VMware AI Labs.
This is where VMware’s Data Services Manager comes in, layering DSM on top of VMware Cloud Foundation.
New offerings from the company include an extended partnership with Google, making Google AlloyDC Omni databases to be run on-premise.
“This is a big deal,” Wolf says. “Omni is a cloud-scale database that is now available on-premise for you – with a great performance increase.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, comments: “We are proud of our existing partnership with VMware. This enables customer to accelerate their digital transformation with the Google Cloud VMware engine, running VMware workloads in Google Cloud.
“With the emergence generative AI (GenAI), our two companies are committed to helping build unified open AI solutions, regardless of where the data is located.
“AlloyDB Omni lets users modernise legacy databases and build new, transformative GenAI applications with superior performance. Customers are able to create business value with modern workflows, building great apps with a compelling total cost of ownership.”
AlloyDB Omni is a PostgreSQL-compatible database that runs anywhere and offers built-in support for generative AI, and the highly performant, more secure, reliable VMware Cloud Foundation, will enable enterprises to modernize their more demanding databases and applications. The solution will allow customers to simplify their management of PostgreSQL, modernise their existing databases, and help accelerate their Al journey with a powerful, proven platform for building transformative generative AI applications.
Many VMware Cloud customers are looking to standardize on open technologies such as PostgreSQL and embrace modern application development. AlloyDB Omni will be the first third-party PostgreSQL-compatible database natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through VMware Data Services Manager and VMware vSAN. The upcoming delivery of AlloyDB Omni on VMware Cloud Foundation will give customers access to an enterprise-grade version of PostgreSQL with full enterprise support from Google Cloud.
AlloyDB Omni will be tightly integrated with VMware Data Services Manager and VMware vSAN to deliver the performance, scalability, and manageability required for demanding enterprise workloads. Data Services Manager will enable customers to deliver database-as-a-service (DBaaS) on-premises to their lines of business, and will provide administrators with a vSphere native experience for managing AlloyDB Omni on VMware Cloud Foundation.
Mutual customers deploying VMware Private AI will be able to bring compute capacity and AI models to where enterprise data is created, processed, and consumed, and also leverage the innovative capabilities of AlloyDB AI, which offers an integrated set of capabilities for easily building enterprise generative AI applications. AlloyDB AI is built into AlloyDB Omni to run vector queries up to 10x faster compared to standard PostgreSQL, generate vector embeddings from within the database, and access Google Cloud’s state of the art AI models on Vertex A.
“VMware and Google have a long history of bringing together the best technologies each company has to offer to help customers accelerate their path to cloud,” says Krish Prasad, senior vice-president and GM: cloud infrastructure business group at VMware. “The integration of AlloyDB Omni with VMware Data Services Manager and VMware vSAN will empower IT teams to manage databases with a consistent operating model and benefit from enterprise storage capabilities. Customers will gain access to a modern enterprise-class database supported on VMware Cloud Foundation environments that simplifies IT management and enables self-service data access for developers.”
Andi Gutmans, vice-president and GM for databases at Google Cloud, adds: “Offering AlloyDB Omni on VMware Cloud Foundation is an exciting expansion of the VMware and Google partnership and promotes our vision of open, multi-cloud database services.
“For too long, organizations have been locked into legacy databases with expensive and inflexible licensing terms. AlloyDB offers a fundamentally different cloud journey based on open PostgreSQL standards and Google technology. With VMware Cloud Foundation you can modernize your legacy databases and applications in place and build new, transformative generative AI apps into the future.”
Combining VMware Cloud Foundation and AlloyDB Omni will provide:
- Superior performance and scalability: AlloyDB Omni’s improved read and write scaling and integrated columnar engine provide excellent performance on vSAN. In our performance tests, AlloyDB Omni is more than 2x faster than standard PostgreSQL for transactional workloads, and delivers up to 100x faster analytical queries than standard PostgreSQL.
- Enterprise-class infrastructure: VMware Cloud Foundation simplifies, automates, and better secures database infrastructure. Advanced capabilities like VMware vSAN’s high performance, scalability, availability, and instant cloning make VMware Cloud Foundation ideal for running AlloyDB Omni.
- Simplified management: VMware Data Services Manager simplifies the management of data services and will have workflows that integrate with AlloyDB Omni to automate database patching, backups, scaling, and replication with minimal training for customer personnel.
- Developer-friendly consumption: User self-service enabled by VMware Data Services Manager will allow application teams to create, consume, and scale AlloyDB Omni instances in minutes to develop and run apps at scale on VMware Cloud infrastructure.
- Google-powered AI capabilities: VMware Cloud customers can smoothly build enterprise-grade applications with AlloyDB AI, an integral part of AlloyDB Omni. Customers will be able to utilize a familiar PostgreSQL interface for working with vectors, models, and data with access to Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s ML platform that helps customers build generative AI applications quickly.