HYBRID CLOUD
VMWARE CLOUD ON AWS UPDATES
WINNER: OVERALL
The next era of VMware Cloud on AWS has arrived with a long list of features recently unveiled including new entry-level pricing, custom CPU licensing capabilities and application-centric security with NSX. Customers can now gain control over east-west traffic between workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS through micro-segmentation provided by NSX. VMware also reduced the entry price for VMware Cloud on AWS by 50 percent and created new custom CPU core count capabilities that allow businesses to specify the number of CPU cores they need. Overall, VMware Cloud on AWS offers lots of new opportunities to solution providers, said Brendan Caulfield, co-founder and managing partner of Chicago-based Turing Group. Along with the familiarity of VMware and “not having to retool your staff,” the offering also provides “the ability to take your VMware infrastructure and now tie in all of those really cool services you hear about on AWS,” Caulfield said.
Subcategory Winner—Customer Demand, Technology: Amazon RDS On VMware
Amazon has armed VMware partners with its database-agnostic Relational Database Service (RDS) that allows them to easily set up, operate and scale databases in VMware-based environments—such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server—that are on-premises or on the Amazon Web Services public cloud.
Finalist: HPE GreenLake Hybrid Cloud
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s GreenLake Hybrid Cloud is a breakthrough pay-per-use offering that combines on-premises private cloud with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack. The offering provides performance optimization, cost controls, security and compliance, leveraging a toolset from HPE’s OneSphere multicloud management Software-as-a-Service platform.
Finalist: IBM Cloud for VMware Updates
With version 2.5 of IBM Cloud for VMware—which enables the extension of VMware environments to the IBM cloud—IBM is providing enhancements including the introduction of private networking, so that IBM’s CloudDriver and CloudBuilder components don’t need a direct connection to the public network.
Finalist: Microsoft Azure Stack Updates
Recent additions to Microsoft’s Azure Stack hybrid offering included the release of Azure Stack for Government. The solution provides government customers with access to the same infrastructure and services that are available on Azure— including the same APIs, DevOps tools and portal—while meeting strict regulatory, connectivity and latency requirements.