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It had been rumoured, but now it’s confirmed: Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware have announced a strategic alliance which will culminate in a new hybrid cloud service snappily titled ‘VMware Cloud on AWS’.
The two companies say the announcement will give customers a full software-defined data centre (SDCC) experience, combining leadership in private and public cloud. The service will run on AWS bare metal infrastructure, while the SDDC side will come predominantly from VMware Cloud Foundation, including VMware vSphere, VMware Virtual SAN, as well as NSX virtualisation technologies.
The product will be available from ‘mid 2017’ onwards, and will be sold by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service. The companies said pricing information would be made available closer to availability date.
“VMware Cloud on AWS offers our customers the best of both worlds,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger in a statement. “This new service will make it easier for customers to preserve their investment in existing applications and processes while taking advantage of the global footprint, advanced capabilities, and scale of the AWS public cloud.”
Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, added: “Most enterprises are already virtualised using VMware, and now with VMware Cloud on AWS, for the first time, it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent and seamless hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS, and without having to purchase custom hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operating model.”
VMware has been busy on the partnership front of late; earlier this week, there was an update on the company’s collaborations with IBM, first announced back in February. According to IBM, 1,000 joint customers are now moving their VMware environments to the IBM Cloud, as well as mobilising and training 4,000 global service consultants to help VMware customers access and leverage IBM’s cloud.
At VMworld in August, the company made note of its SDDC capabilities; VMware Cloud Foundation was claimed to offer “a new ‘as a service’ option that delivers the full power of the SDDC in a hybrid cloud environment.” As this publication noted at the time, VMware’s role in the industry landscape appear to be “an enabler for businesses running on other, more populous clouds.” With that in mind, you can’t get any bigger than AWS in that regard.