Kerrie-Anne Turner (VMware)
New capabilities to improve the economic value of VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been introduced, making it a more affordable option for companies to migrate and update their VMware-based applications.
The offerings include the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) i3en instances that can deliver nearly 50 per cent lower cost per gigabyte of raw storage.
It also includes a 2-host SDDC configuration that lowers the entry price for production environments by 33 per cent (over the usual three-host node option) and a new multi-tenant cloud management service that enables partners to support more customers with no additional upfront costs.
With all this in hand, it opens up a new avenue for companies to jump on the VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS), focusing on a per VM rather than per host basis.
Bringing together the multi-tenant cloud management service with VMware’s Cloud Director technology also throws up a new set of services for partners to take to market, enabling them to provide flexibility in pricing and environment size by dividing their VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC environments into multi-tenanted resource pools, with fine-grained control of resource allocation and support for differing consumption models.
Launching a two-node option helps to solve a broader set of customer problems, particularly in respect to the entry points and entry costs for the service, VMware A/NZ head of commercial business and channels Kerrie-Anne Turner highlighted.
CMD Solutions CEO Andre Morgan said previously customers that were keen to adopt VMC on AWS were not able to because the threshold.
In addition, the number of workloads customers had was much lower than what made financial sense for them, he said.
“The two-node is a great solution and as an MSP and consultant, we're always looking at multi-tenanted architecture. Providing a much lower price point on a per VM-basis, would really appeal to that medium enterprise market, which haven’t been able to take advantage of VMC on AWS beforehand,” he added.
Morgan said the processor and instance change to the i3en.metal, offering more storage density, also made it more appealing.
“When we’re working with clients and figuring out the number of instances required, storage was often a point that tipped it over to put another node in place, rather than the compute requirement, so this is a great way to provide a solution without expanding it out to be too expensive,” he said.
Turner added that it also creates another conversation with the mid-size enterprise market in starting their journey to the cloud -- particularly as more companies ramp up their digital transformation efforts.
“There are still organisations that hadn’t started their journey pre-COVID, but it’s not too late, there’s still an opportunity to start and think about their multi-cloud strategy,” she said.
Leading up to the launch, Turner said there has been a lot of pent-up demand in its customer base, but more importantly there’s an opportunity to drive its partnerships to the next level of engagement with this platform.
“Right now, we’ve got a lot of customers that we can help on their cloud journey and get there faster with an entry point and a cost point that is really important at the moment, particularly as customers are focusing on cost reduction,” she said.
Morgan added that usually moving to a cloud environment attracted a fairly big investment.
“This is really improving that entry point so that customers can start with a two-node cluster for certain workloads and really get a feel for it, and you don’t have to go through a full due diligence and business case associated with evacuating a whole data centre,” he said. “I anticipate that pushing the two-node cluster and a managed service, we should be able to get more traction and help more clients on their journey.”
According to VMware, more than 500 channel partners have achieved a VMware Cloud on AWS service competency, including 43 with a Master Services Competency, and there are more than 300 certified or validated technology solutions available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers.
Furthermore, the new i3en.metal instance, which is based on 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, is designed for storage-dense workloads with high-performance requirements -- all aiming to “deliver superior economics at scale for data centre migration and disaster recovery transformation projects,” VMware said.
Accordingly, these new instances deliver four times the raw storage capacity at roughly half the cost per gigabyte of storage per host of current offerings.
It comes with low latency Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD capacity for applications that require high random I/O access to large amounts of data such as relational databases.
Native encryption at the NIC level offers better security for east-west traffic within the SDDC boundaries. Customer can gain even better economics by mixing and matching i3en instances for storage demanding workloads with i3.metal instances for compute/memory demanding workloads.
Featuring a two-host cluster, this offers a new, smaller minimum environment for production workloads, enabling even more customers, partners, and managed service providers (MSPs) to get started with VMware Cloud on AWS.
Organisations can also deploy, scale, and manage containerised applications on VMware Cloud on AWS with the addition of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, which packages open source technologies and automation tooling to help customers get up and running quickly with a scalable, multi-cluster Kubernetes environment.
