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VMware Cloud on AWS expands to AWS GovCloud (US) and announces new capabilities

Today at AWS re:Invent 2018, we are excited to announce the Initial Availability of VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) – in other words, bringing VMware Cloud on AWS to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. This means we are now in a total of 10 AWS Regions across multiple AWS Availability Zones globally. In addition, we are also announcing new capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Without further ado, let’s take a deeper look.

VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US):

VMware has a long history of providing federal, state and local government agencies with software products that simplified the operation and management of IT. As part of its commitment to deliver technologies that help government operate more efficiently, VMware and Amazon Web Services – the industry leading private and public cloud providers, announced VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US) back in June 2018.

VMware CloudTM on AWS GovCloud (US) is a jointly engineered highly secure, scalable hybrid cloud service that brings VMware’s rich Software-Defined Data Center software to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. With the same architecture and operational experience on-premises and in the cloud, IT teams can now quickly derive instant business value from use of the AWS and VMware hybrid cloud experience.

With the Initial Availability of VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US), United States government customers and partners can run production vSphere-based workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. In addition, this service has completed a FedRAMP High Baseline Readiness Assessment Report (RAR) that is being reviewed by the FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO).

Key value propositions include:

More secure infrastructure to meet stringent security and privacy controls:

  • Leverages the extensive certifications of AWS GovCloud (US).
  • Deployed on dedicated, elastic bare-metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) infrastructure.
  • Utilizes FIPS 140.2 compliant cryptographic
  • On path to achieve FedRAMP High authority to operate (ATO).

Industry-leading capabilities for production applications:

  • Run, manage, and protect production applications in a seamlessly integrated hybrid IT environment.
  • Innovate and respond to changing agency demands with the rich capabilities of VMware SDDC for any application, coupled with the elastic infrastructure of the AWS GovCloud (US), and the breadth and depth of AWS services.
  • Seamlessly move workloads bi-directionally between vSphere-based infrastructure and the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.

Simple and consistent operations to eliminate retraining and rework:

  • Continue to use established on-premises governance and operational policies and extend that with the cloud security and availability that AWS GovCloud (US) brings.
  • Accelerate cloud migrations from months and years to weeks and days by eliminating the rework associated with re-architecting production applications with consistent infrastructure across vSphere-based infrastructure and the AWS GovCloud (US).
  • Eliminate re-training by using familiar skills, tools, and processes for managing cloud environments with consistent operations for improved productivity, and reduced costs.

Flexible cloud consumption with rapid time to value:

  • Deliver agility and rapid time to value with the ability to spin up an entire VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in the AWS GovCloud (US) region in under two hours and scale host capacity in minutes.
  • Align costs to your business needs with flexible consumption options and investment protection.
  • Consume on-demand hourly, or take advantage of one-year and three-year reserved models for deeper discounts.

  • What’s New with VMware Cloud on AWS:

    Earlier this month, I wrote about a slew of capabilities that we announced at VMworld Europe 2018. Since then we went live in AWS Asia-Pacific (Tokyo) region.

    External storage access:

    Today, we are excited to announce that VMware Cloud on AWS is working towards allowing customers to leverage their existing storage investments for use-cases such as disaster recovery, array-based replication, data ownership/sovereignty or simply increasing storage capacity on their SDDC. VMware is working with a variety of partners that have or intend to offer external storage solutions including: Dell EMC, NetApp, HPE, Pure Storage and Faction. These partners, among others, can provide their storage services over AWS Direct Connect or from an EC2 based virtual storage array using AWS’s Elastic Network Interface.   With this capability, customers will be able to augment native SDDC storage expanding the range of addressable use cases.

     

    Availability

    To view the latest status of features for VMware Cloud on AWS, visit: https://cloud.vmware.com/vmc-aws/roadmap.

    Resources:

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