VMware is building closer ties to IBM while aiming to make it easier to use its software in public clouds.
The EMC unit used the first day of its VMworld 2016 conference in Las Vegas to launch Cloud Foundation, a package of its software that will become available for use on public clouds.
For VMware the idea is that it will help administrators to use tools that they are familiar with in order to control server, storage, and networking resources in the public cloud, in addition private clouds in on-premises data centres.
Included in the package will be vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX, and SDDC Manager.
The package will first come to IBM’s public cloud as part of an ongoing effort to strengthen the alliance between the two companies.
The partnership between the two furnish the needs of customers that are adopting a hybrid cloud approach.
At the annual conference the two companies appeared on stage to showcase how customers are using products from both companies together.
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In February the two companies began working together and now more than 500 businesses are running VMware virtual machines on the IBM Cloud, IBM also has nearly 4,000 cloud consultants trained on VMware.
Further moves to strengthen the partnership see a VMware Cloud Foundation compatibility with IBM aiming to make it faster to deploy VMware’s products in an on-premise environment to IBM’s cloud.
The aim is to make it much easier for customers to be able to use VMware’s products in an IBM Cloud and for an IBM Cloud user to use VMware’s products.
Partnerships like this are becoming increasingly common as vendors look for a collaborative approach to the cloud market in order to differentiate themselves from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform that lead the market.
Basically the Cloud Foundation will give users the ability to move workloads and data among cloud, the more clouds that VMware connects to the better it will be for the company’s market share.
The SDDC Manager component will help customers and service providers to automate the deployment and management of VMware cloud software and it will be available as a service from IBM.
In addition to the bolstered partnership with IBM and launch of Cloud Foundation, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell made an appearance at the conference.
Dell, which is expected to complete the $60bn acquisition of VMware’s parent company EMC in the coming weeks, has faced a battle to assure VMware customers that the company will be in safe hands.
Dell appeared on stage to say: “The open ecosystem of VMware is absolutely critical to its success.”
“We’re not going to change it.”
The CEO went on to say that VMware’s soon to be new owners will be focused on making cloud adoption easier and making the ecosystem more powerful.
Continuing the partnership theme, Samsung and VMware have collaborated to develop a fully operational prototype of a VMware Cloud Foundation-based software-defined data centre rack that uses NVMe solid state drives.
Built using siz Dell R730XD servers, each configured with two Samsung PM1725 NVMe SSDs as the caching tier and six Samsung PM836 SATA SSDs as the capacity tier.
The prototype spans successful imagine and bring-up of the integrated system rack, creation of a workload domain, and deployment of applications within the workload-domain hosted VMware vSphere cluster.
Samsung says that this will allow a standalone drive to reach up to one million in random read IOPs and 140K in random write IOPS. The PM1725 is able to reach read and write sequential speeds up to 6GB/s and 1.9GB/s, respectively.
