SAN FRANCISCO, California—During this week's VMworld conference in San Francisco, VMware talked up its cloud partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS.)
VMware hasn't provided a lot of color, including the number of customers, on VMware Cloud on AWS since the service was first announced two years ago, but it offered up a few details on Monday.
In March, VMware and AWS announced that customers could buy VMware Cloud on AWS directly through AWS and the cloud provider’s partner network. Prior to that announcement, customers could only buy the hybrid cloud service through VMware and its partners.
VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service offering that brings VMware’s enterprise class software-defined data center capabilities to AWS, with optimized access to AWS services. The service offers cloud migration, powered by VMware HCX and vMotion combined with hybrid cloud infrastructure and operations.
Once applications are migrated, customers can extend the capabilities of these applications through integration of native AWS services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon SageMaker.
During last week's fiscal second quarter 2020 earnings call, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said that VMware Cloud on AWS was now available in 16 AWS regions globally thanks to the recent addition of the Seoul and Sao Paulo regions.
Since August 2018, VMware Cloud on AWS customers have increased four times while the number of virtual machines (VMs) is up nine times. The number of partners with VMC Competency has increased three times and the number of available ISV (independent software vendor) partner validated solutions is up by a factor of three. VMware said its overall customer support satisfaction rating was 96%.
"We are seeing customers who initially made smaller deployments of VMware cloud on AWS grow those investments," Gelsinger said on the earnings call, according to a transcript by Seeking Alpha. "Key wins this quarter include IHS Markit and Equinox who has deployed VMware cloud on AWS and is also building a number of compelling use cases to help customers operate in a hybrid and multi-cloud world."
While VMware also has cloud partnerships in place with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Project, Gelsinger said VMware Cloud on AWS has been the preferred cloud offering to date.
A study that VMware commissioned with Forrester Consulting study showed that customers who want to migrate to the cloud could save 59% in operational costs with VMware Cloud on AWS versus the equivalent capacity in a traditional data center
As part of the study, Forrester constructed a composite organization representative of companies that were interviewed. The composite organization has the following characteristics: 80 servers; 40 to 1 ratio of VMs to applications; $2 million annual software budget and a three-year contract.
Other benefits to using the service included:
• Avoided application redesign, with a totaling savings of $2.7 million
• Reduced labor hours for operations, saving $1.2 million
• Reduction in data center operating costs, totaling $1.4 million
• Software and hardware savings of $3.2 million.
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VMware announces new Nvidia partnership
In the future, through innovative technology such as Bitfusion, which VMware bought in July, and partnerships with industry leaders such as Nvidia, customers will be able to enrich existing applications and power new modern enterprise applications, including AI, machine learning, and data analytics workflows, through GPU acceleration services, according to VMware.
On Monday, Nvidia and VMware announced their intent to deliver accelerated GPU services for VMware Cloud on AWS to fuel new enterprise applications. VMware Cloud on AWS customers will gain access to a new, highly scalable and secure cloud service consisting of Amazon EC2 bare metal instances to be accelerated by Nvidia T4 GPUs, and new NVIDIA Virtual Compute Server (vComputeServer) software.
“From operational intelligence to artificial intelligence, businesses rely on GPU-accelerated computing to make fast, accurate predictions that directly impact their bottom line,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, in a statement. “Together with VMware, we’re designing the most advanced GPU infrastructure to foster innovation across the enterprise, from virtualization, to hybrid cloud, to VMware's new Bitfusion data center disaggregation.”
VMware didn't say when the new services based on Nvidia's GPU technology and Bitfusion would be available.