On the occasion of the VMworld 2021 event, the French subsidiary of VMware took stock of the main announcements and projects of companies whose multicloud, edge computing, SD-Wan and security needs are growing.
After the era of mono cloud, private and local cloud, companies have fully entered the era of multicloud. A hammered message from many vendors and VMware is of course no exception. “Today our customers are entering the world of multicloud”, confirmed during a press briefing Olivier Savornin, CEO of VMware France. For the manager, the decline of this first generation of cloud was caused by a lack of response to expectations, the absence of lift and shift on the public cloud, limits in terms of reversibility, or even governance not suited to a massive migration into production. On the contrary, by focusing on “the most suitable cloud for each application”, the ease of portability will be optimized, assures the manager. “Multicloud will make it possible to limit spending and meet the challenges of the sovereign cloud,” he assures us. “With the advent of multicloud, we will have to manage the growth in complexity”.
Applications hosted on the trusted cloud and deployed at the edge have a bright future ahead of them for reasons of control and better cost control. “A large traction capacity is identified with the sovereign cloud,” says Olivier Savornin. “We are very proud to have contributed to obtaining the SecNumCloud certification from OVH”. Let us recall in passing that VMware had sold its public cloud resources vCloud Air to the Roubaix supplier a few years ago. Speaking of trusted clouds, how does the virtualization specialist perceive the recent merger of Google and Thales? Apparently good: “this is very good news, this sovereign cloud will have access to Google Cloud VMware Engine to offer an additional choice to accelerate migrations to the cloud,” said Olivier Savornin.
Invest in trusted cloud and cloud native technologies
The French subsidiary of VMware indicates “investing” in the subjects of the cloud of confidence in the coming months and in 2022. This will pass in particular on an in-depth work with the cloud providers present in France (250 according to the editor) to continue and make greater use of VMware technologies. “Our ambition is to maximize the number of SecNumCloud companies which are at the very basis of sovereignty as defined by Anssi with whom we are extremely close to help them”. The publisher also indicates that he is working closely with companies to support them on a trio of projects: sovereignty, portability and application mobility.
Alongside the trusted cloud, the firm is pushing solutions to build native cloud applications, modernize the application heritage and ensure that the cloud infrastructure is interconnected. “The notion of security consistency is also one of the major issues according to VMware”, says the manager. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) is thus at the heart of VMware’s container and K8 strategy from Project Pacific to instantiate containers directly in vSphere. It is the VMware Enterprise distribution for Kubernetes enriched with open source modules for networking, storage, lifecycle management. “Huge progress has been made since the announcement,” says Eric Marin, technical director of VMware France. Among them the launch of the community edition of Tanzu easily usable by developers, the support of artificial intelligence workloads by the support of GPUs in particular of Nvidia in TKG.
Michelin and Carrefour as a benchmark
Numerous announcements on the Edge were also presented during the last VMworld 2021. By 2025, 30% of workloads will be on-premises or private cloud, 40% on public clouds and 30% on the edge. “In the last three weeks alone, we have been working on two interesting cases, one for detecting masks at the entrance to offices and analyzing data as close as possible to the cameras with quantities of images coming from satellites ”indicates Eric Marin. On the edge, the company is working with Michelin with whom it has developed an SD-Wan solution to modernize their factories, improve efficiency and control costs. For Carrefour, which had an omnichannel digital strategy, the project consists of migrating hundreds of on-premises workloads to Google Cloud to take advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence via VMware Google Cloud Engine.
On the VMware Cloud part, the French subsidiary also retains the support at no additional cost from Tanzu Services in AWS for application modernizations allowing a “move to cloud” and portability of containerized applications simplified. Vrealize is also evolving to cover all clouds (AWS, Azure …) and instantiate, monitor performance and costs and workload movements. VMware stack support in Outposts improves native hardware and service support for Edge infrastructure in AWS this quarter.
Safety is not forgotten
In terms of innovation, the publisher also has it under its feet with the Cascade project to provide an API to developers to drive their underlying infrastructure or whether it is in the multicloud. For its part, the Capitola project focuses on memory implementation in data centers serving the application. “We have knowledge of all multicloud applications, in order to maintain an application view,” continues Eric Marin. Among the evolutions also expected, the Arctic project to allow vSPhere on prem administrators to benefit from cross cloud services. “It is an evolution of vSphere towards a hybrid model with a control plane part in the cloud, the big benefit of all this is that the cloud services that we make available will be able to benefit private clouds. and instantiations of VMware on premise, it is a great flexibility in the datacenter ”.
VMware France is also focusing on the group’s security activity, which has grown with more than 30,000 customers in this area today, 1.1 million ransomware attacks stopped over the last 3 months and the reduction in number of false positives and the definition of rules and intrusion detection directly related to the application that we know. Following the acquisition of Datrium, announcements concerning Cloud Disaster were also made with an objective of recovery time (RPO) below the 30 minutes mark and a solution dedicated to specific ransomware. Now integrated in Carbon Black, secure instances for all types of workloads (containers and VMs) do not require the deployment of additional perimeter solutions. Finally, VMware is strengthening its SASE service by providing security, cloud broker and data loss prevention services directly to points of presence, i.e. 150 points of presence (PoP) which deliver SaaS worldwide.
