Ahead of next week's VMworld conference, CenturyLink made several announcements on Thursday, including upgrades to its private cloud platform. CenturyLink also announced it will launch a fully-managed VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services.
CenturyLink said the five enhancements to CenturyLink Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) bring public cloud efficiencies to private cloud and edge-connected computing solutions.
RELATED: CenturyLink draws up its playbook for edge compute services
The new upgrades, which came on the heels of CenturyLink's announcement earlier this month about its edge compute services, will help businesses increase their use of distributed compute resources.
The upgrades include:
• Expansion to third-party data centers globally—CenturyLink Private Cloud can be deployed to more than 2,200 network-connected private and public data centers globally, in addition to the 100 plus edge compute locations that will be supported by its fiber network. The additional flexibility will beef up CenturyLink's low-latency computing solutions to within milliseconds of its global network. CenturyLink didn't say which third-party data center companies it was working with.
• Support for VMware Enterprise PKS—The service now provides enterprise-grade monitoring and management of container solutions for production workloads.
• Support for VMware HCX Migration and Hybridity Tool – VMware HCX is now the migration tool of choice for extending, migrating and integrating environments together when customers are implementing design updates, architecture changes, or logical migrations across CenturyLink’s VMware portfolio.
• Support for Caveonix RiskForesight – RiskForesight addresses the need for continuous compliance and cybersecurity through real-time visibility into workloads, proactive risk management, compliance monitoring, and policy enforcement. With RiskForesight, CenturyLink's regulated industry customers can detect, predict and act on cyber threats and compliance issues.
CenturyLink also announced that the private cloud service is now standardized on second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Xeon also enables new features such as Intel Deep Learning for AI inference acceleration as well as the latest Intel Optane Solid State Drivers.
“These latest upgrades are great examples of CenturyLink’s innovation to give our customers more ways to tap into the power of the software-defined data center and our robust global network,” said Paul Savill, senior vice president, product management, CenturyLink, in a statement. “For workloads that don’t fit cleanly into a public cloud environment, or workloads that require greater proximity to the network edge, our private cloud portfolio enables the enterprise to address these use cases with agility and efficiency.”
CenturyLink Private Cloud is available in 41 hosting locations on four continents. Integrating CenturyLink Private Cloud for VMware Cloud Foundation with CenturyLink Cloud Application Manager provides a single pane of glass for monitoring, automation and support for mission-critical business workloads.
CenturyLink is among a small group of VMware Cloud Verified partners. It runs one of the world's largest VMware management practices for enterprise and government customers on its global network.
VMworld runs from Sunday through Thursday in San Francisco.
CenturyLink launches managed VMware Cloud on AWS service
CenturyLink also announced on Thursday that it will launch CenturyLink Private Cloud for VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will be available in several regions late this year and early next year.
An integrated offering jointly developed by AWS and VMware, CenturyLink Private Cloud for VMC on AWS delivers an integrated hybrid cloud solution.The platform can extend on-premises vSphere environments to a VMware software-defined data center running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) infrastructure.
The CenturyLink Private Cloud for VMC allows enterprises to run, manage and secure their applications in a hybrid IT environment across a common management plane with their enterprise data center.
“As an innovator in the software-defined data center, this is another milestone on our journey to hybrid cloud solutions, enabling users to tap into private cloud resources anywhere our global network can reach,” said CenturyLink's David Shacochis, vice president of product management for IT solutions, in a statement. “These advances are fueled by CenturyLink’s decades of expertise and mature relationships with both VMware and AWS.”
RELATED: CenturyLink garners AWS Managed Services Provider Partner status
After a nearly six-month process, CenturyLink gained AWS' stamp of approval by being named as a Managed Service Provider Partner a year ago. CenturyLink has also completed the VMware Cloud Verified process for all its services that are based on VMware technologies and VMware Cloud Foundation architectures.