Cloud Foundation adoption is skyrocketing in tandem with the growing movement toward the hybrid cloud. IT decision-makers across enterprises now understand that the VMware products they know and love alone are in fact better together than they ever were apart—delivering consistent, simple, secure and agile cloud infrastructure so you can enjoy the flexibility of the public cloud with the security and control of on-prem, private cloud.
But though IT staffers know and understand Cloud Foundation, they still require hard data points and persuasive arguments to effectively advocate for its adoption within the enterprise. That’s why we’re addressing frequently asked questions or misnomers about Cloud Foundation with #VCFacts. Read on to become an advocate of future-proof infrastructure today.
Fact #1: VCF-based clouds are 28% cheaper than alternatives
A third-party study by The Taneja Group stated unequivocally that Cloud Foundation is cheaper than comparable cloud infrastructure options. That’s true across both on-premise and public cloud approaches, as well as in the enterprise-preferred hybrid cloud operating model.
For on-prem, Cloud Foundation, utilizing a software-defined data center (SDDC), saves organizations nearly $1.5 million over three years when compared to the traditional 3-tier converged infrastructure system. The Taneja Group found that Cloud Foundation “significantly reduced” server and shared storage costs associated with the traditional 3-tier system—resulting in savings similar to large web-scale service provider data centers. And although SDDC software costs were incrementally higher in Cloud Foundation, they were offset by huge hardware CapEx and maintenance savings.
That same third-party analysis also compared Cloud Foundation-based VMware Cloud on AWS to Microsoft Azure (chosen because it’s a popular, frequently cited alternative to AWS), finding both readily apparent and less visible cost differences. For the former, support, permanent storage, snapshot storage, and VM-type costs all contributed to Azure costing nearly $200,000 more than VMware Cloud on AWS.
Also, the need to invest considerable time upfront to research and sort out various configuration options adds uncalculated yet very real costs to Microsoft Azure when compared to VMware Cloud on AWS. Rather than go through a pricing calculator with hundreds of choices and combinations, VMware Cloud on AWS admins instead simply calculate how much VM capacity each host node can handle and then multiply the number of hosts needed to cover a workload scenario. That’s critical because, unlike in Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS users can change VM configurations on the fly and still know their exact monthly cost envelope.
However, neither of the above scenarios address the most preferred data center architecture—the hybrid cloud. But here too, Cloud Foundation offers significant cost savings over similar alternatives.
That’s because VMware Cloud on AWS is built on Cloud Foundation’s core software, providing VMware customers who rely on VMware as their enterprise virtualization provider an instantly functional hybrid cloud with just the click of a button. These customers get on-premise and public cloud operational consistency, integrated hybrid cloud management and uncompromised workload portability.
In contrast, Microsoft Azure (and similar Public clouds) comes with significant refactoring costs that often pose a large barrier to corporate adoption of the public cloud. When you factor in these one-time costs, the savings for VMware Cloud on AWS users rises to over $1.2 million, according to the Taneja Group.
So, while VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud on AWS and Microsoft Azure all provide savings over the traditional 3-tier approach, a Cloud Foundation-powered hybrid approach offers the biggest savings of them all. The facts are clear; VMware Cloud Foundation is more affordable and higher performing than comparable non-VMware alternatives. For more information, check out the Taneja Group’s analysis, “When Comparing Cloud Alternatives, For the Best TCO Leverage VMware Cloud Foundation.”
Fact #2: VCF components are all market leaders in their respective categories
When it comes to VMware Cloud Foundation, it’s 1s across the board. Each individual component ranks at the very top of its respective category:
- vSphere, our server virtualization platform, holds a #1 market share and is deployed by 500,000 customers. The majority of the workloads it runs, 80%+, are enterprise-level.
- vSAN, our hyper-converged infrastructure solution, is #1 in HCI software and in HCI appliances. In fact, 60% of the top 2,000 public companies globally use vSAN, and we work with 500 cloud partners.
- NSX Data Center, our network virtualization software offering, is the #1 software-defined networking solution, used by 88% of Fortune 100 companies and by 8 of the top ten Telcos worldwide plus another 13,000 additional customers.
- vRealize, our hybrid cloud management platform, is #1 in market share of cloud management platforms, used by 99 of the world’s top 100 public organizations and 45,000 other customers.
These are not boasts but simple #VCFacts, and they’re just one part of the reason we’re so bullish on the future of Cloud Foundation. The other? Our broad ecosystem of partners means you can take advantage of Cloud Foundation’s reliability and simplicity no matter your desired configuration.
Interested in managing your own private cloud? Cloud Foundation works with nearly every hardware provider—from HPE, Dell EMC and Fujitsu to Cisco, Lenovo and more. Or would you rather VMware manage both your private and public clouds? Get the former with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and the latter with VMware Cloud on AWS. Even better, if you’re ready to move to the hybrid cloud, Cloud Foundation offers a single point of control across both on-premise and public clouds, seamlessly bridging the gap and enabling unmatched flexibility.
You may in fact already be using Cloud Foundation without even knowing it. For companies that offer hosted services to third parties, Cloud Foundation works as a software-as-a-service offering to our global ecosystem of VMware Service Provider Partners, including Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM.
When it comes to proven performance, nothing can keep pace with Cloud Foundation. Again, that’s not us bragging; that’s just #VCFacts.
Fact #3: VMware Cloud Foundation has endless automation capabilities
VMware Cloud Foundation is much more than a product installer. It is a fully engineered solution that integrates the various components of a VMware software-defined data center providing guaranteed interoperability, thereby offering cloud administrators with greater operational simplicity, greater agility, and productivity.
By automating traditionally manual and complex processes, Cloud Foundation delivers a solution that is easy to deploy and manage. The end result? A simple path to an agile and secure hybrid cloud. In fact, according to VMware analysis and testing, customers who use its fully automated capabilities achieve up to 15x faster speed to market, 20x swifter app provisioning by end-users, and approximately 30 to 40 percent lower TCO of private cloud deployments.
Cloud Foundation’s automated capabilities include:
- Deployment of Standardized Architecture: Cloud Foundation automates the deployment of a standardized HCI architecture based on a VMware Validated Design, which reflects VMware best practices and serves as a blueprint for software-defined data centers. By doing so, Cloud Foundation provides repeatability, increases accuracy, and reduces risk.
- Automated Deployment: Cloud Foundation automates the deployment of the full infrastructure stack, including compute, storage, network, and management. This level of automation enables quick, repeatable deployments while reducing the operational cost of engineering the environment with an in-house skillset and reducing the inherent risk of manual misconfigurations. Cloud Foundation also automates use-case specific components, such as Horizon with the 3.7 release and PKS with the most recent 3.8 release.
- Automation and Governance: Cloud Foundation enables IT to deliver a self-service hybrid cloud with automation and governance. The cloud automation capabilities enable the cloud administrator to on-board tenants, implement policy-based governance and access control over underlying cloud infrastructure resources, and automate the delivery and lifecycle of cloud environments and developer services. This enables authorized users, such as other IT teams, developers, SREs, and DevOps teams, to use service catalog, APIs, or CLI to directly request resources, speeding up infrastructure and application service delivery.
- Automated Lifecycle Management: Cloud Foundation provides built-in lifecycle management that automates day 0 to day 2 software platform operations, such as configuration and provisioning of infrastructure resources and patching/upgrading of the software stack.
- Self-driving Operations: Cloud Foundation includes self-driving operations delivering continuous performance optimization based on operational and business intent, efficient capacity and cost management, proactive cloud planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance management.
In sum, VMware Cloud Foundation provides a fully automated and integrated hybrid cloud experience that has a lasting business value. We aren’t trying to boast, but simply show you the #VCFacts. After all, why make things harder than they need to be when you can automate?
