Pat Gelsinger, VMware | VMworld 2018

Pat Gelsinger, @PGelsinger, CEO of VMware, sits with John Furrier, @furrier, & Dave Vellante, @dvellante, from VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, NV.

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VMware, AWS embrace seamless cloud computing for on-premises and hybrid environments

Since its days bridging hardware islands between the likes of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Dell Technologies Inc. and IBM Corp., VMware Inc. has been dedicated to managing disparate computing units and creating ecosystem-friendly, hardware-independent solutions for simplified customer consumption.

When virtualization shifted the organization’s mission of bridging to the world of cloud computing, VMware partnered with Amazon Web Services Inc. to increase accessibility and facilitate simplified migration between public and private data centers.

“The old model of networking doesn’t work,” said Pat Gelsinger (pictured), chief executive officer of VMware Inc. “It must all be done from a software level. That means conceiving a globally distributed control plan that allows you to span multiple clouds and data centers anywhere on the planet. That’s the core of our virtual cloud network strategy,”

Gelsinger spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They discussed VMware’s partnership with AWS and how the two industry leaders are working together to clarify the cloud for customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Scaling across the planet
The primary goal of VMware’s AWS collaboration is to facilitate seamless migrations between private data centers and public cloud, ensuring customer data lives wherever it is needed for business purposes. The company’s announcement that this integration will now enable Amazon Relational Database Service on-premises took its promise of seamless hybrid cloud computing a step further.

“We’re giving people the access to this rapidly growing public cloud, but we’re also demonstrating that we can seamlessly connect it to the private cloud. And now we’re bringing services back from the public cloud onto the private data center,” Gelsinger said.

The alliance allows for the end-to-end data source network management, as well as the metrics and security models across a complex network of services that customers need to utilize and migrate data with confidence.

“I can build new things there, but moving was really hard until we had the VMC service — this ability to move things to and from the cloud,” Gelsinger said.

Despite market concerns that a partnership with AWS could stifle VMware expansion, the company is continuing to look at new avenues of growth through both integrations and innovation. Gelsinger announced plans to embrace Kubernetes as “a new dial tone for the VMware layer,” saying the organization plans to evolve and standardize the open-source platform as it builds it into the infrastructure.

The company is also re-architecturing the NSX data center as NSX-T to address customer needs of scale and interoperability. “[They] need to scale this across the planet, to work in VMware and non-VMware environments, to be native in multiple public clouds, and to stretch it into the container level,” Gelsinger said.

VMware’s partnerships and internal transformations have led to massive cloud innovations over the last few years, and Gelsinger is looking forward to seeing how the market leverages the company’s current and future offerings. “It is the seminal moment where the industry is seeing the value of the multicloud era, and now we’re giving them the tools to embrace it,” he said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)