IBM is teaming up with longtime partner VMWare on a deal that will see the latter's widely used virtualization software deployed across Big Blue's global network of data centers. Here are the key details from the announcement at this week's IBM Interconnect conference:
With nearly 100 percent of Fortune 100 customers utilizing VMware technologies, this partnership will help preserve and extend customer investments across thousands of data centers. Customers will be able to leverage VMware’s proven technologies with IBM’s growing footprint of 45 Cloud Data Centers worldwide, helping companies scale globally while avoiding retooling expenses, development risks and reducing security concerns.
IBM and VMware have jointly designed an architecture and cloud offering that will enable customers to automatically provision pre-configured VMware SDDC environments, consisting of VMware vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN on the IBM Cloud.
With this SDDC environment in place, customers will be able to deploy workloads in this hybrid cloud environment without modification, due to common security and networking models based on VMware.
IBM will utilize its extensive CloudBuilder tools and workload automation capabilities to automatically provision pre-configured or custom workloads to the cloud, validated by VMware's design patterns for Software Defined Data Center architectures. In addition, VMware has extended vRealize Automation and vCenter management tools to deploy and manage environments on the IBM Cloud, as if they are part of a customer’s local data center.
The two companies also will jointly market and sell new offerings for hybrid cloud deployments, including seamless workload migrations, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data center consolidation.
Analysis: Something for Everyone
The VMWare-IBM partnership is "huge" and has benefits for all stakeholders, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller.
For customers, there's now a major new option for moving VMWare workloads from on-premises to the public cloud, Muellier says. For VMWare, IBM's Softlayer cloud provides a bare-metal deployment option with a single global service-level agreement. Finally, IBM stands to get what every public cloud vendor needs more of—enterprise application workloads, Mueller adds.
Other major announcements out of the conference include WebSphere connect, which will tie the prevalent on-premises middleware to IBM's cloud, as well as a preview version of a cloud Swift runtime and related technology, including a new open-source app server.
Swift is the wildly popular programming language developed and later open-sourced by Apple. While Swift has been associated with client-side programming, IBM's efforts around Swift center on the server side, and also advance its partnership with Apple around enterprise mobile applications.
Meanwhile, the key point of WebSphere connect is help customers run existing assets on a modern platform, Mueller says. "There are more details needed but it basically means investment protection for customer," he says. "Instead of focusing on porting or re-writing old applications, they can focus on building net-new next-gen apps.
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