VMware Cloud Foundation became generally available at VMworld 2016 and we have already started to see significant customer traction across industry verticals, such as healthcare, financial services, and federal sectors, and company sizes in the few months heading into 2017.
The early customer adoption has revealed several key reasons as to why customers are choosing Cloud Foundation, including simplification of IT operations through automation, ease of scalability with hyper-converged architecture, and an enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure for both private and public cloud.
I would like to share with the broader VMware community in more detail the key use cases these customers are planning to deploy Cloud Foundation for.
Use Case 1: Private Cloud with IaaS Capability
Cloud Foundation is the quickest way to stand up an entire SDDC stack. With the help of SDDC Manager, Cloud Foundation natively brings together all the software infrastructure components of a Software-Defined Data Center (vSphere, vSAN, and NSX) and deploys them in a consistent and automated manner.
The ability to rapidly provision infrastructure, a single pane of glass for managing infrastructure, and the automated updates and upgrades of the SDDC stack through SDDC Manager all lead to significant OpEx savings for our customers. For customers with IT departments that are constrained by resources, Cloud Foundation eliminates many non-value added tasks of managing their IT infrastructure, so IT professionals can focus on the tasks that matter.
Finally, some of our savvy customers are deploying Cloud Foundation and vRealize Automation (as part of vRealize Suite) to build a private cloud that automates both IT infrastructure and IT services delivery. The synergy that these two platforms brings to the table unlocks the complete power of the Software-Defined Data Center and gives further agility to help our customer focus on business innovation.
Use Case 2: Data Center Modernization Through Next-Gen Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
In this particular case, customers have decided on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as the architecture going forward for their on-premise data center due to benefits such as flexibility to scale linearly depending on usage, smaller datacenter footprint, and more streamlined datacenter processes.
Cloud Foundation provides faster time to value for customers looking to deploy an HCI solution and also bring the added benefits of NSX for automating security around networking at scale. Cloud Foundation is the Next-Gen Hyper-Converged Infrastructure where all three key pieces of the Software-Defined Data Center come together.
This use case especially resonates with customers who are undergoing hardware refresh, building a new datacenter or those needing to comply with specific legal or compliance requirements. With Cloud Foundation, customers have a repeatable software stack that they can deploy across multiple datacenters and scale up/out as their business requires.
Use Case 3: Common Platform that Extends into Public Cloud (IBM, AWS, vCloud Air, etc)
Customers are looking for a solution to bridge the gap between private cloud and public cloud. They love the flexibility and freedom of public cloud, but also want to maintain control of their data and applications in their own private cloud. The problem is there’s no unified platform that provides commonality between the two clouds….
Until Cloud Foundation!
With Cloud Foundation already running on IBM Cloud, the impending launch of VMware Cloud on AWS (powered by Cloud Foundation), and upcoming release of Cloud Foundation on vCloud Air (learn about beta program here), customers have the choice to consume different public clouds knowing that their on-premise private clouds will have the same software platform as their choices of public cloud. In addition to these three public cloud services, we are continuing to grow our ecosystem of partners.
We have seen multiple customers who have deployed Cloud Foundation with the goal of creating uniform hybrid cloud environments to federate data and applications across their public and private clouds. Marriott and Clarient are prime examples of customers who are leveraging Cloud Foundation on IBM Cloud to build their hybrid cloud.
Get Excited and Stay Connected!
At VMware, we are excited about the early momentum we are seeing for Cloud Foundation! This is only the beginning and we are working hard to innovate with Cloud Foundation to help our customers on their journey to adopt the SDDC and achieve their hybrid cloud vision.
For more information:
- Check out the product page for Cloud Foundation
- Follow us on Twitter: @vmwCF
- Stay in touch by following our Cloud Foundation Blog
