For VMware Cloud Foundation, 2016 has been the year of many firsts – the general availability of the first release, initial adopters, and new exciting partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud and vCloud Air to deliver a true cross-cloud hybrid solution for our customers. Today, we are happy to announce another first for VMware Cloud Foundation – CRN’s 2016 Cloud Platforms Product of the Year award!
Recognized products represent best-in-breed technological innovation as judged by CRN editors and the solution provider community at large, taking into consideration a number of factors in determining their ratings, including product quality and reliability, technical innovation, ease of integration, potential to drive revenue, and fulfillment of market and customer demands.
Cloud Foundation marks an important milestone in the evolution of cloud computing, delivering the most advanced software platform for the hybrid cloud. It’s no secret that highly-dynamic compute, storage, networking and security services are nowadays table stakes to stay competitive in the digital transformation era. Pressure to innovate at a faster pace pushes IT departments and business owners to look for enterprise-grade IT infrastructure that can be accessed more rapidly, simpler to manage and more cost effective. Cloud Foundation responds to these needs with an innovative approach that makes it easy to build and manage the hybrid cloud.
What is Cloud Foundation?
Cloud Foundation unifies VMware vSphere, vSAN, NSX and SDDC Manager into a natively integrated stack that is (1) highly programmable because it is software-defined and (2) granularly scalable because it is based on a next-gen hyper-converged architecture that combines scale-out storage with network virtualization. SDDC Manager is the fourth and newest component of Cloud Foundation. It adds new lifecycle management capabilities that makes it extremely simple to operate, automating the bring up, configuration, provisioning and patching of the VMware software stack. Cloud Foundation is a hardware-independent platform that can be deployed on-premise on low cost commodity hardware or run as-a-service in the cloud.
To learn more, visit our product page: http://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-foundation.html
Read about the Cloud Foundation TCO savings: http://www.vmware.com/go/cloud-foundation-tco
Why is this important?
Cloud Foundation brings several important benefits. The most important one in my opinion is that, for the first time, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a globally consistent software-defined infrastructure platform that sits below the most common application platforms, PaaS/container solutions, etc. This enables operational consistency no matter where an application may run. Our customers love this approach because it simplifies data center operations – private cloud can be as simple as public cloud, finally! – and gives them the flexibility to deploy workloads to different cloud environments while maintaining consistent and centrally managed security, audit, operations, etc. To quote Alan Rosa, SVP of IT Delivery and Security Technology at Marriott International, one of the early adopters of Cloud Foundation in the IBM Cloud:
“[..] Ideally, customers and developers won’t even need to know, much less care, whether their apps are running from on-premise virtual machines or over the cloud. An automated policy could simply decide which makes the most sense for a project. Either option should be just as resilient, just as available.” – Alan Rosa, SVP of IT Delivery and Security Technology at Marriott International
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK0qjlUONg&feature=youtu.be
No better words capture the essence of what Cloud Foundation is all about.
The recognition from CRN marks a great end to 2016 for VMware Cloud Foundation and we’re excited for more great things to come in 2017!
