Explore 2023: VMware Accelerates Data-Driven Innovation with Data Services Capabilities for Cloud Foundation

At VMware Explore 2023, VMware, Inc. announced the next-gen of its Data Services Manager, designed to support today’s data-driven innovation by making data services as easy to consume as what the company has achieved for virtualized compute, storage, and networking.

Data Services Manager will deliver management for a range of data services, not just databases, as a natively integrated experience for VMware Cloud Foundation customers, serving the needs of IT admins, data teams, and developers alike. These capabilities, along with new data services partnerships with Google Cloud and MinIO, and VMware Cloud advancements, will deliver developer-ready infrastructure to accelerate modern app innovation, provide multi-cloud flexibility and agility, and enable more secure and resilient organizations.

Cloud Foundation delivers innovations from the company’s on-premises and public cloud software offerings in a unified stack to enable a consistent and more secure environment across any on-premises, hyperscaler cloud, or partner cloud environments. It is the underpinning for VMware Private AI and yields benefits for modern AI/ML and generative AI workloads such as simplified management, enhanced scalability, improved security, and optimized resource usage. It is delivered as a service by 100s of CSPs, including those delivering VMware Sovereign Clouds.

“Whether residing on premises, across hybrid clouds, or in a sovereign cloud environment, data is the fuel for digital transformation. Through our new data services innovations and partnerships, we are making VMware Cloud Foundation the best platform to power the traditional, modern, and AI/ML applications that are central to business,” said Krish Prasad, SVP and GM, cloud infrastructure business unit. “VMware Cloud enables customers to build, deploy, run, and protect a broad set of high value workloads across their data infrastructure on multiple consistent cloud endpoints, with the same operational model and service level objectives for performance, business continuity, and security.”

Simplifying data services management
The company will empower IT to consistently and more securely manage databases, object stores, streaming, warehouse, caching, and querying solutions running on Cloud Foundation. This strategy will help customers accelerate their digital transformation by building, deploying, and operating a diverse and growing data estate. With VMware Data Services Manager, IT admins will benefit from the native company’s infrastructure management experience for data services, including full control of infrastructure policies. Data teams and database administrators will maintain full control over data policies and be able to deliver a self-service offering for databases and other best in class data services on-premises to their lines of business, enabling rapid innovation for developers.

The firm is also announcing that Google Cloud AlloyDB Omni will be the 1st 3rd PostgreSQL-compatible database natively integrated with Cloud Foundation through VMware Data Services Manager and vSAN. With AlloyDB Omni, customers will have access to an enterprise-ready PostgreSQL-compatible database, with Google Cloud support, on reliable, scalable, and secure Cloud Foundation environments. With AlloyDB Omni running on vSAN customers can experience more than 2x the transactional performance and up to 100x the analytical performance of standard PostgreSQL across a wide range of queries and workloads ⁽¹⁾. (read full announcement).

Additionally, the company is announcing MinIO Object Store will be the first 3rd object storage natively integrated with Cloud Foundation through Data Services Manager. MinIO is a resilient object store offering active-active replication for mission-critical production environments. Running on Cloud Foundation and managed through Data Services Manager, it will be a solution for data lake implementations and large-scale AI/ML use cases.

Detection and recovery from ransomware
Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly more sophisticated as the data from companies becomes more lucrative. To help organizations combat this evolving threat landscape, the company is announcing new solutions and technologies that enable organizational resilience.

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Intelligent Threat Detection is a capability in technology preview that will deliver proactive AI/ML-powered encryption prevention and response, allowing customers to see more to stop more and recover faster. Customers will be able to identify modern ransomware prior to encryption using aggressive behavioral analysis of powered-on workloads in a cloud-based isolated environment and detect encryption events across protected workloads by analyzing file system metadata, data change rates, and entropy.

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VMware Live Recovery is a new offering that provides cyber and data resiliency for VMware Cloud. It delivers unified protection, secure cyber recovery and simplified consumption. Customers benefit from unified management of ransomware and DR across on-premises and public clouds, confident and accelerated recovery from modern ransomware, and flexible licensing for changing business needs and threats.

Modern, consistent cloud infrastructure and management for all applications

Cloud Foundation advancements include:

• Enhanced networking and security with support for the vSphere Distributed Services Engine (DSE), modernizing data centers by offloading full stack infrastructure functions from CPUs to DPUs.
• Enhanced support for NVMe storage platforms with new support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) that enables customers to deploy next-gen servers that deliver higher performance, more scalability, and improved efficiency.
• Unified experience and fast issue resolution delivered by VMware Aria Operations with updates that include the ability to understand sustainability posture across data center footprints as well as meaningful grouping of alerts enabled by AI to help manage alert storms and improve troubleshooting capabilities.

Availability:

• The next-gen of VMware Data Services Manager, as well as VMware Live Recovery, VMware Aria Operations capabilities, and updates across Cloud Foundation, are all expected to be available in the firm’s 4FY24.
• Google AlloyDB Omni and MinIO Object Store for VMware Cloud Foundation, plus Intelligent Threat Detection, are currently in Tech Preview.

⁽¹⁾ Based on internal Google Cloud Testing from March 2023