AWS and VMware Help Customers Migrate and Modernize Enterprise Workloads with Speed and Confidence
September 2, 2022
At VMware Explore 2022, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) and VMware, Inc. showcased the continued innovation and customer value the companies are delivering together. New capabilities in the jointly engineered VMware Cloud on AWS service and broad availability of VMware Cross-Cloud services on AWS Marketplace help customers accelerate moving VMware workloads to a more modern and secure infrastructure in AWS to support enterprise cloud transformation.
Whether it’s by choice or by compelling events like the COVID-19 pandemic, business leaders are looking for ways to speed up their digital transformation and thrive in this era of fast-moving disruption. That’s why VMware and AWS remain fully committed to meeting the needs of customers through the companies’ unique joint work.
“VMware Cloud on AWS continues to deliver compelling new capabilities that help customers move quickly and non-disruptively to the cloud with compatibility and operational consistency across their existing vSphere-based deployments,” said Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager, cloud infrastructure business group at VMware. “And once workloads are running in VMware Cloud on AWS, the service can deliver significant ongoing savings by optimizing resource utilization while ensuring better workload availability, protecting against today’s complicated and dangerous lateral threats, and enabling the next-generation of modern applications. Together with AWS, we are accelerating our delivery of new innovations for the broadest range of enterprise workloads.”
“Customers want to accelerate cloud migrations with operational consistency and flexibility, reduce costs while scaling to meet global business demand, and modernize workloads and increase innovation with cloud-native services,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president, AWS sales and marketing at AWS. “Together with VMware, we are giving customers the fastest path to cloud migration and modernization for their enterprise vSphere workloads. We allow them to speed application innovation, simplify cloud operations, and further improve security by running on the AWS global infrastructure.”
New Capabilities Improve Flexibility, Performance and ROI
Research shows VMware Cloud on AWS customers can achieve 46% faster cloud migration and 57% reduction in TCO. VMware Cloud on AWSbrings VMware’s enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center software to AWS bare metal infrastructure to run enterprise workloads more securely at scale, across both virtual machines and containers. The service features built-in Kubernetes and optimized access to 200+ native AWS services including data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to deliver a pragmatic approach to app modernization. Built-in VMware NSX security capabilities help stop advanced, persistent threats that can move laterally within and across cloud and data center environments. The latest advancements include:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) I4i instances for I/O-intensive Workloads: Powered by 3rd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Ice Lake), Amazon EC2 instances help deliver better workload support and delivery, lower TCO, and increased scalability and application performance. Compared to I3, the I4i instances provide nearly twice the number of physical cores, twice the memory, three times the storage capacity, and three times the network bandwidth. The I4i instances help minimize latency and maximize transactions per second (TPS) for certain workloads such as transactional and NoSQL databases that need fast access to datasets on local storage. Workloads such as real-time databases, data warehouses, and data analytics benefit from higher compute performance per TB of storage.
External, Flexible Cloud Storage Options: New external cloud storage options help customers optimize/lower the cost of cloud capacity, and flexibly scale and fine tune compute and storage independently as needs evolve, especially for data-demanding workloads such as databases, big data and analytics, EDA, and media processing.
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Integration Availability:As a native AWS cloud storage service that is certified as a supplemental datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, FSx for ONTAP offers fully managed shared storage built on the familiar NetApp ONTAP file system trusted by VMware customers running on premises today. Customers can now use FSx for ONTAP as a simple and elastic datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS, enabling them to scale storage up or down independently from compute while paying only for the resources they need. Customers can also benefit from ONTAP’s enterprise data access, data management, and data efficiency capabilities to further simplify and cost-optimize their VMware Cloud on AWS deployments.
VMwareCloudFlexStorage Availability: A new VMware-managed and natively integrated cloud storage and data management solution that offers supplemental datastore-level access for VMware Cloud on AWS. With just a few clicks in the VMware Cloud Console, customers can scale their storage environment without adding hosts, and elastically adjust storage capacity up or down as needed for every application. Customers also benefit from a simple, pay-as-you-consume pricing model. Together with VMware vSAN, VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers flexibility and customer value in terms of resilience, performance, scale, and cost in the cloud.
Cost-Effective, Flexible Consumption Option: VMware Cloud Flex Compute represents a new cloud computing model that will help customers start faster with smaller units with VMware Cloud on AWS. Customers will be able to start running workloads in minutes using environments that are expected to be 97% smaller than the minimum required to support production workloads today. Customers will also be able to better meet the cost and performance requirements of enterprise applications by using smaller units containing vCPU, memory, storage, and network resources and adjusting as their capacity requirements change versus adding/removing full hosts. VMware Cloud Flex Compute is currently in preview.
Rapid Ransomware Recovery: VMware uniquely makes recovery from a ransomware attack faster, more predictable, and less prone to error with VMware Ransomware Recovery for VMware Cloud DR. This purpose-built ransomware recovery-as-a-service solution enables safe recovery designed to prevent re-infection of IT and line-of-business production workloads through its innovative use an isolated recovery environment on VMware Cloud on AWS. Guided recovery workflows allow customers to quickly identify recovery point candidates, validate restore points using embedded behavioral analysis, and recover data with minimal loss.
Continued Global Expansion: VMware Cloud on AWS is now available in the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region, bringing coverage of the service to 21 regions globally. This includes both AWS GovCloud (US West) and AWS GovCloud (US East) regions for which the service is FedRAMP Authorized to allow US government agencies and customers supporting the US government to migrate, manage, and operate sensitive workloads in the cloud.
Empowering Customers to Consume VMware Services in AWS Marketplace
VMware and AWS continue to make it easier for AWS customers to purchase and deploy VMware Cross-Cloud services to support AWS . Organizations can use their existing AWS EDP agreements to consume VMware Cross-Cloud Cloud services to modernize their mission-critical enterprise apps on AWS. Available services include VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Tanzu, VMware Carbon Black, CloudHealth, and VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI Networks) with more to come.
Customers and Partners Globally Modernize with VMware Cloud on AWS
Lotte is one of the leading confectionery manufacturers in Japan. “With the help of VMware, AWS, and our DXC Technology, the foundations for our digital transformation are in place, and Lotte is ready for new challenges and growth,” said Mr. Hisaaki Ogata, Senior Manager of ICT Strategic Division, Lotte Corporation. “VMware Cloud on AWS proved to be a strategic platform that helped us move more than 4,000 Horizon VDI workloads to AWS and enabled us to manage through the pandemic with a smooth transition to remote work. Beyond enhancing employees’ work experience, the Lotte migration to the cloud has also allowed the company to build an infrastructure that can respond to business growth and new opportunities with flexibility.”
Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) is the largest distributor of bicycle parts and accessories in the bicycle industry. “Faced with 11 months to move our complete production environment out of our existing colocation facility, QBP turned to VMware Cloud on AWS and completed the entire migration in only three months,” said Joe Van Ert, systems architect, Quality Bicycle Products. “In doing so we unlocked the door to AWS and have achieved the best of both worlds. We gave our developers access to AWS tools that help them modernize the apps they are building and delivering while continuing to run our business on a proven VMware enterprise architecture. We are now free from having to manage hardware and do other mundane administrative tasks and can invest in more strategic IT projects that are helping to move our business forward.”
Schibsted is Scandinavia’s largest media group, recently expanding into online classified marketplaces and personal finance holdings. “To grow and achieve synergy across all our brands, VMware, AWS, and Kyndryl have helped us make a strategic shift to become a cloud native company,” said Ken Sivertsen, Cloud Infrastructure Architect, Schibsted Enterprise Technology. “We are now taking full advantage of the highly scalable VMware Cloud on AWS. The service has enabled us to modernize our infrastructure and operations while reducing costs by eliminating substantial portions of our aging on-prem environment. This includes replacing physical security applications with the built-in firewall capabilities VMware offers, which allowed us to move to a Zero Trust architecture.”
