WekaIO (WEKA), the data platform provider for performance-intensive workloads, announced today that it has been named a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner^® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage for a third consecutive year. The company was evaluated for its WEKA^® Data Platform software solution and recognized for its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

According to Gartner, By 2027, 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will implement hybrid cloud file deployments, up from 20% in early 2023. By 2028, 70% of file and object data will be deployed on a consolidated, unstructured data storage platform, up from 35% in early 2023.¹

WEKA is helping many of the world's leading enterprises and research organizations to overcome the performance limitations, latency bottlenecks, and inefficiencies of their legacy data infrastructure systems to more optimally manage unstructured data and performance-intensive workloads and derive maximum value from their data.

The WEKA Data Platform is purpose-built to modernize enterprise data stacks in the era of hybrid cloud and generative AI. Its advanced, software-based architecture transforms stagnant data storage silos into dynamic data pipelines that help to power data-starved GPUs more efficiently and fuel performance-intensive workloads like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing seamlessly and sustainably. The WEKA platform delivers affordable high performance at scale running on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, and in hybrid and multicloud environments.

"We are honored to again be recognized as a Visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage," said Liran Zvibel, co-founder and chief executive officer at WEKA. "The rise of generative AI and proliferation of performance-intensive workloads are accelerating the pace of innovation at incomprehensible levels. It's an exciting time, but enterprises are under increased pressure to address performance bottlenecks, improve operational efficiencies, control costs, and rein in their carbon and energy footprint. WEKA is committed to helping them overcome these challenges so they can innovate and create without limits and capitalize on the immense opportunity presented by AI, ML, and GPU-powered computing."

PlatformDIGITAL®'s dedicated access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect provides data center customers in Seoul with secure, high-performance connectivity for hybrid IT workloads

Customers can leverage Digital Realty's global service orchestration platform ServiceFabric™, to establish hosted connections from nearly 135 data centers globally

Digital Realty, the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions, announced today that a new AWS Direct Connect on-ramp is available at Digital Realty's ICN10 data center in Seoul enabling customers to access AWS services via a single cross connect as well as through ServiceFabric™, Digital Realty's global service orchestration platform. Digital Realty's ICN10 data center is the first carrier neutral facility to host an AWS Direct Connect on-ramp in Seoul.

By utilizing this reliable connection, Digital Realty's customers in Seoul can connect their private infrastructure to the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region, enabling improved performance for hybrid architecture solutions with low-latency, secure, and cost-efficient connectivity to AWS.

Data exchange volumes and a corresponding demand for data center services in South Korea are expected to escalate over the next few years as the country's significance as an emerging data center hub grows. As one of the most innovative countries in the world, South Korea consistently leads in technology adoption, and is now unleashing a government-wide digital transformation by utilizing technologies like AI and the cloud to become a technology-led, data-driven society. IDC projects the country will be investing in artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, reaching $2.9 billion in AI spending by 2026.

AWS Direct Connect provides the high throughput and consistency required for data-intensive applications such as AI by providing a dedicated and secure connection, resulting in sensitive data traffic traveling exclusively between trusted endpoints, improving security and privacy. Digital Realty's customers, including financial services, e-commerce, healthcare, and manufacturing enterprises, can securely connect to AWS Direct Connect via low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects to meet increasing business demands. PlatformDIGITAL® provides the physical meeting place where AWS customers and partners can establish direct connections to AWS, to optimize hybrid IT solutions.

With the addition of Seoul, and following the recent announcement of Ashburn, PlatformDIGITAL® now hosts 17 AWS Direct Connect cloud on-ramps globally in Amsterdam, Ashburn, Atlanta, Cape Town, Copenhagen, Dublin, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, London, Madrid, Marseille, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Stockholm, Vienna and Zurich.

In addition to dedicated connections, customers can establish hosted connections in Amsterdam, Ashburn, Atlanta, Copenhagen, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Marseille, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Stockholm, Vienna and Zurich via Digital Realty's interconnection and orchestration solution, ServiceFabric™, from over 135 Digital Realty locations globally.

"Our customers increasingly recognize the value of placing their private infrastructure in our facilities worldwide to facilitate hybrid architectures across a combination of colocation and one or multiple cloud platforms. The addition of AWS Seoul Direct Connect extends Digital Realty's robust portfolio of Direct Connect locations into the rapidly growing Asia Pacific region and will drive an exponential increase to connection density of PlatformDIGITAL®. The availability of cloud on-ramps, an extensive community of local and global carriers, as well as intelligent orchestration through ServiceFabric™ will provide our customers with comprehensive options to modernize their edge-to-cloud networking architectures," says Chris Sharp, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Realty.

"With AWS Direct Connect, you can transfer data privately and directly from your data center, office, or colocation environment into and out of AWS. These private connections can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than connections over the public internet. Customers can choose dedicated 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 100 Gbps connections, or work with an AWS Direct Connect delivery partner like Digital Realty for hosted connections with bandwidth from 50Mbps to 10 Gbps," says Emad Benjamin, General Manager, AWS Direct Connect.

"We applaud Digital Realty's latest achievement in hosting the new AWS Direct Connect on-ramp at ICN10 in Seoul, a development that positions Seoul more firmly as a global data center hub. Colt is proud to be one of the first global network providers to establish a point of presence (PoP) at this innovative data center, extending our comprehensive network capabilities to customers seeking low-latency, high-bandwidth solutions. Our partnership with Digital Realty, coupled with AWS Direct Connect's availability at ICN10, offers our customers unparalleled connectivity options that meet the demands of today's data-driven world. We are committed to empowering businesses in Korea and beyond, providing seamless network connections between ICN10 and our Colt IQ-network that spans over 230 cities in 38 countries," says Sooyoung Sung, Korea Country Manager, Colt Technology Services.

MinIO to be the first 3^rd party object store natively integrated with VMware Data Services Manager, empowering organizations to engage with data intensive workloads

MinIO Inc., creators of the MinIO object storage suite, announced today an expanded partnership and a technical preview to deliver object storage on VMware Cloud Foundation by integrating with VMware Data Services Manager. This solution will combine VMware Cloud Foundation's more secure enterprise-class infrastructure and the MinIO Object Store to deliver a fully integrated experience for mission-critical workloads running on VMware Cloud Foundation. 

"Our integration with VMware Data Services Manager is a key milestone in the development of the private cloud," said Ugur Tigli, CTO of MinIO Inc. "The ability to seamlessly support both virtual machines and Kubernetes provides much needed flexibility for enterprises to modernize their infrastructure over time. This combined solution is further evidence of the importance object storage holds in the modern enterprise and we are excited to have MinIO natively integrated with VMware Data Services Manager."

Data Services Manager is a native extension of VMware vSphere that empowers customers to manage best-in-class data services on-premises to their internal customers, most notably application teams in the lines of business. Data Services Manager integration builds on MinIO and VMware's long history of technical collaboration, delivering a natively integrated experience and removing key dependencies in favor of greater administrator flexibility. IT admins will be empowered to manage multiple data services such as relational databases in addition to an object store with a consistent operating model and benefit from VMware vSAN's enterprise storage capabilities.

"VMware's strategy is to make advanced data services such as the MinIO Object Store as easy to consume for customers as we did for compute, networking and storage," said Vijay Ramachandran, vice president of product management, Storage and Data Infrastructure for VMware. "Customers and community members globally use MinIO every day to deliver better security, resiliency, durability and operational excellence across their deployments. Now together with MinIO, we are bringing this capability to VMware Cloud Foundation as a natively integrated data service to help accelerate data-driven innovation."

MinIO's software-defined, high-performance object store has delivered 325 GiB/s GET and 165 GiB/s PUT on 32 nodes of NVMe in its published benchmarks¹. With linear performance scaling, MinIO can handle the most demanding object storage workloads - from AI/ML and advanced analytics to security information and event management tasks. Additionally, MinIO is optimized to support both small objects and large objects, providing a highly extensible data store that serves as the foundation for modern datalakes. 

The integrated solution will support any storage, including vSAN, and will support any DVS, DHCP or static IP pools. It will provide a "bucket-as-a-service" solution to developers aimed at abstracting away the complexity associated with storage classes and policies while retaining that control for the VI administrator. Collectively, this offers the balance of developer flexibility and agility with the requirements for control and security.

VMware Private AI with Intel will deliver the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence through superior privacy, security, performance, scale and TCO

VMware Explore 2023 — VMware, Inc. today announced a collaboration with Intel to extend the companies’ more than two decades of innovation to help customers accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and enable private AI everywhere – across data centers, public clouds, and edge environments. VMware and Intel are working to deliver a jointly validated AI stack that will enable customers to use their existing general-purpose VMware and Intel infrastructure and open source software to simplify building and deploying AI models. The combination of VMware Cloud Foundation and Intel’s AI software suite, Intel® Xeon® processors with built-in AI accelerators, and Intel® Max Series GPUs, will deliver a validated and benchmarked AI stack for data preparation, model training, fine-tuning and inferencing to accelerate scientific discovery and enrich business and consumer services.

More than 300,000 customers deploy VMware Cloud globally, and VMware virtualization software is deployed nearly everywhere in the enterprise where data is created, processed, or consumed. This makes VMware Cloud a fast means to bring AI-accelerated compute and models to wherever business gets done. Similarly, Intel offers open, scalable and trusted solutions to hundreds of thousands of customers. The ubiquity of VMware and Intel products in the enterprise is a powerful combination which will increase the accessibility of data science, and enable organizations globally to adopt Private AI, an architectural approach that aims to balance the business gains from AI with the practical privacy and compliance needs.

“When it comes to AI, there is no longer any reason to debate trade-offs in choice, privacy, and control. Private AI empowers customers with all three, enabling them to accelerate AI adoption while future-proofing their AI infrastructure,” said Chris Wolf, vice president of VMware AI Labs. “VMware Private AI with Intel will help our mutual customers dramatically increase worker productivity, ignite transformation across major business functions, and drive economic impact.”

“For decades, Intel and VMware have delivered next-generation data center-to-cloud capabilities that enable customers to move faster, innovate more, and operate efficiently,” said Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center and AI Group (DCAI) at Intel. “With the potential of artificial intelligence to unlock powerful new possibilities and improve the life of every person on the planet, Intel and VMware are well equipped to lead enterprises into this new era of AI, powered by silicon and software.”

Boost AI Performance and get a More Secure AI Infrastructure with Lower TCO

VMware Private AI brings compute capacity and AI models to where enterprise data is created, processed, and consumed, whether in a public cloud, enterprise data center, or at the edge, in support of traditional AI/ML workloads and generative AI. VMware and Intel are enabling the fine-tuning of task specific models in minutes to hours and the inferencing of large language models at faster than human communication using the customer’s private corporate data. VMware and Intel now make it possible to fine-tune smaller, economical state of the art models which are easier to update and maintain on shared virtual systems, which can then be delivered back to the IT resource pool when the batch AI jobs are complete. Use cases such as AI-assisted code generation, experiential customer service centers recommendation systems, and classical machine statistical analytics can now be co-located on the same general purpose servers running the application.

VMware and Intel are designing a reference architecture that combines Intel’s AI software suite, Intel® Xeon® processors, and Data Center GPUs with VMware Cloud Foundation to enable customers to build and deploy private AI models on the infrastructure they have, thereby reducing total cost of ownership and addressing concerns of environmental sustainability. This VMware Private AI reference architecture with Intel AI will include:

• 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX) deliver up to 10x significant out-of-box performance improvements using standard industry frameworks and libraries, end-to-end data science productivity tools, and optimized AI models.
• Intel® Data Center GPU Max contains up to 128 Xe cores and is Intel’s foundational GPU compute building block targeted at the most demanding AI workloads. Intel Max Series GPUs will be available in several form factors to address different customer needs.
• Intel’s AI software suite is packaged with end-to-end open source software and optional licensing components to enable developers to run full AI pipeline workflows from data preparation to fine-tuning to inference, accelerate building multi-node scaling and deploying AI on enterprise IT infrastructure. The open oneAPI framework enables processors and hardware accelerator-agnostic software development, allowing developers to write code once and run it across different architectures, eliminating the need for multiple code bases and specialized languages. Intel’s Transformer Extensions and PyTorch Extension’s deep integration with developer favorite open source Hugging Face libraries provide automated optimization recipes for fine-tuning and compressing models for efficient inference.

VMware Cloud Foundation brings consistent enterprise-class infrastructure, operational simplicity, and enhanced security to VMware Private AI through capabilities such as:

• VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture which offers up to 30% greater performance¹ and minimal overhead for important capabilities such as encryption for I/O intensive AI/ML tuning and inferencing workloads.
• vSphere Distributed Resources Scheduler helps efficiently use spare compute capacity for AI model training and inferencing, leveraging the same clusters other AI applications use, thereby maximizing capacity and reducing TCO.
• VMware NSX for building micro segmentation and advanced threat protection capabilities.
• Secure boot and Virtual TPM to enable model and data confidentiality.

VMware Private AI will be supported by servers from Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo running 4th Gen Xeon CPUs with Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX) and Intel Max Series GPUs.

VMware Cloud empowers customers to modernize, optimize and better protect apps, infrastructure and operations at every stage of their cloud transformation journey

VMware Explore 2023 — Today, VMware, Inc. announced the next generation of VMware Data Services Manager, designed to support today’s data-driven innovation by making data services as easy to consume as what VMware has achieved for virtualized compute, storage, and networking. VMware Data Services Manager will deliver best-in-class management for a wide range of data services, not just databases, as a natively integrated experience for VMware Cloud Foundation customers, serving the needs of IT admins, data teams, and developers alike. These capabilities, along with new data services partnerships with Google Cloud and MinIO, and new VMware Cloud advancements, will deliver developer-ready infrastructure to accelerate modern app innovation, provide multi-cloud flexibility and agility, and enable more secure and resilient organizations.

VMware Cloud Foundation delivers innovations from VMware’s on-premises and public cloud software offerings in a unified stack to enable a consistent and more secure environment across any on-premises, hyperscaler cloud, or partner cloud environments. VMware Cloud Foundation is the underpinning for VMware Private AI and yields benefits for modern AI/ML and generative AI workloads such as simplified management, enhanced scalability, improved security, and optimized resource usage. VMware Cloud Foundation is delivered as a service by hundreds of Cloud Services Providers (CSPs), including those delivering VMware Sovereign Clouds.

“Whether residing on premises, across hybrid clouds, or in a sovereign cloud environment, data is the fuel for digital transformation. Through our new data services innovations and partnerships, we are making VMware Cloud Foundation the best platform to power the traditional, modern, and AI/ML applications that are central to business,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager, cloud infrastructure business unit, VMware. “VMware Cloud enables customers to build, deploy, run, and protect a broad set of high value workloads across their data infrastructure on multiple consistent cloud endpoints, with the same operational model and service level objectives for performance, business continuity, and security.”

Simplifying Data Services Management

VMware will empower IT to consistently and more securely manage databases, object stores, streaming, warehouse, caching, and querying solutions running on VMware Cloud Foundation. This strategy will help customers accelerate their digital transformation by building, deploying, and operating a diverse and growing data estate. With VMware Data Services Manager, IT admins will benefit from the native VMware infrastructure management experience for data services, including full control of infrastructure policies. Data teams and database administrators will maintain full control over data policies and be able to deliver a self-service offering for databases and other best in class data services on-premises to their lines of business, enabling rapid innovation for developers.

VMware is also announcing that Google Cloud AlloyDB Omni will be the first third-party PostgreSQL-compatible database natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through VMware Data Services Manager and VMware vSAN. With AlloyDB Omni, customers will have access to an enterprise-ready PostgreSQL-compatible database, with Google Cloud support, on reliable, scalable, and highly secure VMware Cloud Foundation environments. With AlloyDB Omni running on VMware vSAN customers can experience more than 2x the transactional performance and up to 100x the analytical performance of standard PostgreSQL across a wide range of queries and workloads¹.

Additionally, VMware is announcing MinIO Object Store will be the first third-party object storage natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through Data Services Manager. MinIO is a highly performant and resilient object store offering active-active replication for mission-critical production environments. Running on VMware Cloud Foundation and managed through Data Services Manager, MinIO will be an ideal solution for data lake implementations and large-scale AI/ML use cases.

Comprehensive Detection and Recovery from Ransomware

Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly more sophisticated as the data from companies becomes more lucrative. To help organizations combat this evolving threat landscape, VMware is announcing new solutions and technologies that enable organizational resilience.

Intelligent Threat Detection is a new capability in technology preview that will deliver proactive AI/ML-powered encryption prevention and response, allowing customers to see more to stop more and recover faster. Customers will be able to identify modern ransomware prior to encryption using aggressive behavioral analysis of powered-on workloads in a cloud-based isolated environment and detect encryption events across protected workloads by analyzing file system metadata, data change rates, and entropy.

VMware Live Recovery is a new offering that provides cyber and data resiliency for VMware Cloud. VMware Live Recovery delivers unified protection, secure cyber recovery and simplified consumption. Customers benefit from unified management of ransomware and disaster recovery across on-premises and public clouds, confident and accelerated recovery from modern ransomware, and flexible licensing for changing business needs and threats.

Modern, Consistent Cloud Infrastructure and Management for All Applications

New VMware Cloud Foundation advancements include:

• Enhanced networking and security with support for the vSphere Distributed Services Engine (DSE), modernizing data centers by offloading full stack infrastructure functions from CPUs to Data Processing Units (DPUs).
• Enhanced support for NVMe storage platforms with new support for vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) that enables customers to deploy next generation servers that deliver higher performance, more scalability, and improved efficiency.
• Unified experience and fast issue resolution delivered by VMware Aria Operations with updates that include the ability to understand sustainability posture across data center footprints as well as meaningful grouping of alerts enabled by AI to help manage alert storms and improve troubleshooting capabilities.

New VMware Tanzu platform enhancements and Spring with Spring AI, Spring Boot 3.2, and Data Services to fuel next generation of modern apps

VMware Explore 2023—VMware, Inc. today announced new updates to Spring, the leading Java development framework, plus enhancements across VMware Tanzu Platforms, VMware Tanzu Data Services, and VMware Tanzu Intelligence Services that will help teams develop, operate, and optimize higher-performing applications more quickly, cost-effectively, and securely.

Software development teams are at the forefront of business innovation, building modern applications that drive market share growth and revenue. However, the ability to quickly deliver applications that integrate leading-edge technology like AI and machine learning is often complicated by the need to learn new tools, platforms, and acquire additional skills even as more software delivery responsibilities shift left. Generative AI continues to reshape industries and presents a massive opportunity for all organizations.

“Today, the velocity of innovation is what differentiates companies from the competition. The value of next generation apps will be accelerated through new capabilities like machine learning and artificial intelligence and scalability across any cloud,” said Purnima Padmanabhan, senior vice president and general manager of Modern Apps and Management Business Group, VMware. “We have been focused on providing developers with great tools and experiences for decades. As we mark the 20th anniversary of Spring this year, our latest enhancements and deep integration to the Tanzu Platform give application teams the ability to leverage more cutting-edge technology like AI in new apps and take those apps to production quickly, safely, and more securely.”

Modern Data Integration and Innovation with VMware Tanzu Application Platform

Modern application development and delivery is increasingly complex, leaving organizations with too many silos, inefficiencies, and risk. VMware Tanzu simplifies the experience of the underlying infrastructure, security, tooling, content and data services, and developer experience so application and infrastructure teams can better collaborate on the delivery of higher quality apps, securely and at scale, to any cloud, anywhere. VMware Tanzu has introduced the following enhancements across its app platform offerings to help developers and platform teams deliver business outcomes with software:

• Tanzu Application Platform adds DORA metrics with Deployment Frequency and Lead Time for Changes in the developer portal, enabling teams to track and benchmark their software delivery performance to continuously assess and improve software delivery practices while providing greater transparency and accountability to business goals.
• VMware Tanzu Spring Runtime is now integrated in Tanzu Application Platform, including a commercial subscription to Spring tools with extended support for a seamless experience in building mission-critical Java applications with Spring.
• VMware Tanzu Application Service 5.0 improves the developer experience with a new Postgres tile for DBaaS and AI tile (beta) with an included trained LLM available to the familiar “cf push” experience, reduces platform costs and improved disaster recovery workflows, and expands cloud availability with support for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Spring Enhancements Enable Developers with AI and App Security

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of Spring, the most common framework for Java development and the 10^th anniversary of Spring Boot which continues to grow 50% year over year for 5 years running¹. With Spring, developers can stay ahead of ever-shifting technological transformations by having innovative new capabilities integrated into a familiar Spring experience for a simplified path to building next-generation applications.

Today’s updates are designed to improve application performance, reduce costs, and improve security to be well-suited for modern operating models like cloud containers and serverless, including:

• The general availability of Spring Boot 3.2 and Spring Framework 6.1 release enables developers to create GraalVM native images that use Spring Boot and Java 21's virtual threads (Project Loom) to achieve better app runtime scalability, energy efficiency, startup time, and RAM consumption.
• Spring AI is a newly graduated project designed to simplify and streamline the development of AI applications by enabling developers to use the familiar Spring Framework with simplified commands to add AI capabilities to their application development process.
• VMware Tanzu Spring Health Assessment helps organizations understand their Spring application portfolio’s dependencies and identify security issues. This allows organizations to effectively remediate issues, improve software compliance, and mitigate risk.

Tanzu Data Services integrates Machine Learning (ML) and AI Capabilities and Simplifies Data Fleet Management

Integral to modern application architecture are data services, including messaging, caching, processing, and databases to power next-generation workloads across any cloud. Tanzu Data Services enhancements add new ML/AI capabilities, improve and optimize performance, and streamline management, including:

• Tanzu Greenplum’s automated machine learning agent (beta) to simplify and streamline machine learning set-up and tasks; VMware Tanzu GemFire Vector DB Extension to deliver low-latency querying for next generation use cases, such as generative AI and natural language processing; VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ 1.6 for high throughput data messaging for resource-limited environments, including Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge applications.
• A simplified bundle of all of the data offerings, plus a new VMware Tanzu Data Hub (tech preview) that will unify and streamline fleet management of VMware Tanzu and ecosystem data services across multiple clouds and Kubernetes environments.

Tanzu Intelligence Services Enables Proactive Governance and Continuous Optimization

Tanzu Intelligence Services, first introduced at VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, helps organizations gain deep insights into, continuously improve, and proactively govern the cost, performance, and security of their apps and clouds by policy in near real-time to adjust to the changing needs of business. New capabilities include:

• VMware Tanzu CloudHealth empowers organizations to achieve cloud sustainability goals with GreenOps support (beta), giving visibility into power consumption and carbon emissions with recommendations for rightsizing the cloud environments.
• VMware Tanzu Guardrails enhances proactive governance and continuous compliance with reports to highlight key findings, including configuration drift, policy violations, and vulnerabilities across multiple cloud environments.
• VMware Tanzu Application Catalog enhances open-source content security with new customization of open-source artifacts to the base OS image and form factor aligned to corporate standards and the ability to centrally view and browse the inventory of open-source software bill of materials (SBOMs).

Capabilities within the Tanzu platform will continue to integrate into a common control plane, VMware Tanzu Hub. Today, we’re announcing enhancements to Tanzu Hub including a refreshed user experience and navigation; integrated observability solution from Tanzu Insights; migration planning and assessments from VMware Tanzu Transformer; cost reports from Tanzu CloudHealth including Cloud Smart Summary, Cost History, Rightsizing, Anomaly Detection; and enhancements to Intelligent Assist in Tanzu to search external sources like 3^rd third-party documentation in addition to environment inventory to better diagnose and resolve issues across environments.

Intelligent Assist, Increased Telemetry and Workflow Automation to Ease Connecting, Securing, and Managing Workloads for Enterprise and Telco Edges

New Integrations with Microsoft and Symantec to Help Customers Simplify, Better Secure and Modernize their Edge Environments

VMware Explore 2023—VMware, Inc. today announced new solutions and expanded partnerships to help customers accelerate their digital transformation at the edge. Building upon the recently introduced VMware Software-Defined Edge, these innovations and new integrations will help customers to simplify, better secure, and modernize their edge environments, and include:

• New VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator telemetry capabilities for better visibility of edge workloads.
• Introduction of Intelligent Assist for the VMware Software-Defined Edge to simplify the operational experience across multiple stakeholders.
• An expanded collaboration to enable VMware SASE customers to use Microsoft Security Copilot.
• New Workflow Hub for VMware Telco Cloud Automation to support the rapid rollout of cell sites.
• Initial integration with Symantec to better secure the software-defined edge.

VMware defines the software-defined edge as distributed digital infrastructure for running workloads across a number of locations, close to endpoints that are producing or consuming data. It extends to where the users and devices are – in the office, on the road, in a cell site, or on the factory floor. VMware addresses all three layers of the software-defined edge: the top edge compute layer which hosts the applications and workloads; the intelligent overlay where SD-WAN and security services run; and the underlay network layer, which runs the software for network connectivity across fixed and 5G networks to provide orchestration and network programmability.

“The introduction of the VMware Software-Defined Edge has resonated with both enterprises and Communication Service Providers,” said Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider and Edge, VMware. “It provides the right-sized compute footprint, the zero-touch orchestration and the network programmability architecture needed to run a variety of edge workloads. We see a proliferation of the software-defined edge at edge locations ranging from Telco 5G cell sites, smart factory floors, energy substations, retail 2.0 stores to branch offices across all distributed enterprises. We are helping customers across all four phases of deployment: edge telemetry being the first step, and then workload consolidation, support for edge AI apps leading to real-time applications on the smart factory floor. We deliver on these use cases by incorporating generative AI, enhanced security and advanced automation across our software-defined edge portfolio.”

Gaining Insight into Edge Workloads with VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator

To further operationalize edge workloads, VMware today announced new VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator telemetry capabilities to provide insight and visibility into edge workloads, identify end devices, and make available contextual information across workload, compute, and network to accelerate problem resolution. Originally introduced at VMware Explore Las Vegas, VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator will provide unified management for VMware SASE and the VMware Edge Compute Stack—an industry-first offering to bridge the gap between edge networking and edge compute.

Simplifying the Operational Experience at the Edge with Generative AI

Edge computing is going mainstream as enterprise application deployments accelerate at the edge. But as enterprises and service providers transform their edge environments, they can expect several challenges: edges that are too complex with Internet of Thing (IoT) devices, edge-native applications, users and infrastructure; tool proliferation leading to fragmented insights; and gaps in budget, staff and skillset that lead to poor operational experience.

To help customers and partners address those challenges, VMware is unveiling Intelligent Assist for VMware Software-Defined Edge to operationalize connecting, securing, and managing workloads, users and IoT devices at the edge. Based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the solution is expected to extend the power of VMware Edge Intelligence (formerly VMware Edge Network Intelligence) to accelerate automation, shrink the skillset gap, and speed up resolution. In August 2023, VMware announced Intelligent Assist, a family of generative AI-based solutions trained on VMware’s proprietary data to simplify and automate all aspects of enterprise IT in a multi-cloud era. According to Gartner, “In 2022, perhaps 5% of edge computing deployments involve some level of ML — but by 2026, at least 50% of edge computing deployments will involve it.¹”

Further Securing the Edge with Microsoft Security Copilot

Beyond operations, VMware will further help customers incorporate generative AI technology into their software-defined edge architectures. VMware today announced that it has joined the Microsoft Security Copilot partner private preview. Microsoft Security Copilot is a gen AI-based tool that helps customers to quickly detect and respond to threats and better understand the threat landscape overall. VMware and Microsoft will collaborate to offer VMware SASE customers the option to share insights from their SASE deployment with Microsoft Security Copilot. VMware’s participation in the Microsoft Security Copilot partner private preview will help to augment the security events the tool learns from to include network perimeter security information.

Enabling Rapid Rollout of RAN Sites with Workflow Hub

Today, VMware also announced VMware Telco Cloud Automation 3.0 featuring the general availability of Workflow Hub. Using a newly developed, no-code framework, Workflow Hub enables Communications Service Providers (CSPs) to easily define repeatable workflows and scale them out across their network so that they can save time, monitor and troubleshoot progress and reduce operating expenses. When it comes to the provisioning and deployment of RAN sites, for example, Workflow Hub allows an operator to quickly stitch together pre-built templates and tap into to third-party tools to construct an executable and repeatable workflow for cell sites. With Workflow Hub, an operator can then rapidly roll out new cell sites in a few hours—saving time, operating costs, and facilitating a complete network deployment at scale.

New Symantec Integration to Help Strengthen Edge Security

To deliver consistent security across all edge locations, applications, users, and devices, VMware today announced initial integration with Broadcom Inc.’s Symantec. VMware has extended its Security Service Edge (SSE) orchestration integration to include Symantec Cloud Secure Web Gateway (SWG) (formerly Web Security Service). With this new integration and planned evolution, VMware expects to deliver an additional single-vendor SASE option with additional best-in-class networking and security capabilities.

NetApp StorageGRID adds VMware sovereign cloud integration capability to further support customers facing complex data residency and privacy regulations

NetApp®, a global data-centric, cloud-based software company, today announced the launch of NetApp StorageGRID for VMware Sovereign Cloud. The NetApp Plugin for VMware Cloud Director Object Storage Extension enables sovereign cloud customers to more cost-effectively store, protect and preserve unstructured data while ensuring compliance with international data residency and privacy regulations. NetApp also announced the latest release of NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware vSphere (OTV 10.1), a solution designed to simplify and centralize enterprise data management in multi-owner vSphere environments.

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