VMware launches cross-cloud architecture

VMware launched its Cross-Cloud Architecture at VMworld 2016, along with a partnership with IBM Cloud and plans to extend to Google, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

The architecture is designed to let network operators manage, provide uniform policies for and secure applications running across public, private and hybrid clouds.

Cross-Cloud Architecture is available in two main parts:

• The VMware Cloud Foundation is designed to allow network operators to launch private clouds and extend them to the public cloud. It is an integration that VMware says will combine some of its existing compute, storage and networking virtualization offerings, helping organizations run and manage existing on-premises applications on both private and public clouds.
• Cross Cloud Services, announced as a technology preview, runs applications across multiple public clouds, including IBM, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google, as well as VMware’s vCloud Air hybrid cloud architecture and the vCloud Air Network of 4,000 service providers.

The new Cross-Cloud strategy sees the company focusing more on selling products that work with existing leaders, rather than trying to establish itself as an alternative to AWS, Google or Azure. It will also provide an essential orchestration layer that helps network operators coordinate cloud applications

As more companies run applications on rented infrastructure over the internet rather than their own data centers, providing the link to the different technologies customers use is a growing opportunity for VMware and something that it can also provide to partners like IBM.

Earlier this year, IBM and VMware set out to tackle one of the industry’s most pressing challenges: extending existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to the cloud without incurring the cost and risk associated with retooling operations, re-architecting applications and re-designing security policies.

During a presentation, Guido Appenzeller, chief technology strategy officer of networking and security at VMware and Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud said that Cloud Foundation will “automatically provision pre-configured” software-defined data centers on IBM Cloud “in hours versus weeks or months.”