VMware Cloud™ on AWS: Seamlessly Integrated Hybrid Cloud
Amazon went public in 1997 at $18 per share, giving it a valuation of $300 million. Investment experts, and even some of Amazon’s own stockholders, doubted the company’s ability to be profitable and chalked up the hype as part of the dot-com fever spreading at the time.
But Amazon founder Jeff Bezos knew better. The company warned investors in its filing that it expected “to report ’substantial operating losses for the foreseeable future,’ due to heavy investments in technology and marketing as it seeks to beat back tough competition.”
Bezos understood something then (and now) that many did not: that his was a digital business, that technology would become Amazon’s competitive differentiator and that maintaining the company’s competitive position required continual investments in technology.
Yet most companies today don’t view themselves as technology companies. “Many businesses are stuck running digital projects…but digital projects are not a digital business,” a Gartner analyst recently said. Imagine Amazon today if Bezos had considered it a book business in 1995.
Instead, Amazon has gone on to become the largest public cloud provider in the world. Amazon accounts for nearly half (47.8 percent) of the total infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, according to Gartner, and it’s aggressively growing its core cloud business.
And VMware, the virtualization pioneer, is the de facto leader and continues to dominate in the virtualization space. Together, they’re poised to help organizations achieve their digital transformation goals and become the digital businesses they’re meant to be.
VMware Cloud on AWS: The best of both worlds
“Two-thirds of all business leaders believe that their companies must pick up the pace of digitalization to remain competitive,” reports Gartner. But they also want to leverage their existing on-premises infrastructure, as well as their IT teams, tools and processes.
Hybrid clouds offer today’s organizations the speed and agility needed to respond to changing business needs, capture new opportunities, better control costs and accelerate innovation.
VMware Cloud on AWS brings together two powerhouse technology leaders to create a hybrid cloud solution that leverages your existing VMware enterprise software-defined data center—and your teams, tools and processes—with optimized access to AWS services. It’s the best of both worlds.
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VMware |
AWS |
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Leading compute (VMware vSphere®), storage (vSAN™) and network virtualization (NSX®) capabilities |
Flexible consumption model |
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Support for a broad range of workloads |
Expansive set of cloud services |
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De facto standard for enterprise data centers |
Global scale and reach |
Why VMware Cloud on AWS?
While internal IT teams will have to navigate the paradigm shift from an on-premise/CapEx to a cloud/OpEx mindset—which will require some re-tooling—you can almost “set and forget” an existing VMware-powered data center into the cloud. The existing technical toolsets and processes will be the same and VMware resources will still be managed by vCenter, but you’ll now have simplified migration, flexible workload placement and easy load balancing.
- Rely on secure, reliable enterprise-class functionality
- Leverage high-performance VMware assets running on AWS bare-metal infrastructure.
- Ensure application uptime via built-in functionality for zero-RPO infrastructure availability.
- Prevent the lateral spread of threats with policy-driven micro-segmentation and distributed firewalls.
- Secure all data at rest via software-based encryption.
- Leverage Elastic DRS for automatic scaling and load balancing.
- Maximize the value of existing apps using AWS services.
- Enable lower cost DR in a day with VMware Site Recovery.
- Leverage existing skill and tool sets, processes and VMware technologies
- Use familiar VMware technologies or validated third-party solution providers.
- Quickly achieve your cloud strategy while reducing operational overhead.
- See all on-premises and VMware Cloud on AWS resources in a single view.
- Rely on familiar experience with unified, in-product and single-point-of-contact VMware support.
- Focus on applications and innovation while VMware partners manage infrastructure patches and upgrades.
- Control costs with flexible consumption models
- Match costs to business requirements with multiple options and investment protection.
- Take advantage of flexible on-demand hourly consumption or discounted one- and three-year reserved instances.
- Provision an entire VMware SDDC environment in two hours!
- Quickly add or remove hosts or optimize use via Elastic DRS.
Potential VMware Cloud on AWS use cases
With VMware Cloud on AWS, you can run workloads across on-premise data centers and in the cloud for maximum flexibility. Here are just some of the potential use cases:
- Cloud migration – For organizations that already have a cloud strategy, VMware Cloud on AWS provides an easy application migration path. Once migrated, you can modernize applications using other VMware cloud services and native AWS services—an ideal solution if you don’t want to re-architect applications. This is also a good way to move specific or enterprise apps to the cloud or to move your entire data center to the cloud. Value: Simplify and speed migrations, while reducing cost and risk and leveraging existing investments.
- Data center expansion – For organizations that want to expand their on-premises footprint, VMware Cloud on AWS provides on-demand, SDDC-consistent cloud capacity for specific needs, such as mergers and acquisitions, test/dev environments, seasonal spikes and geographic expansion. It’s also ideal way to avoid additional hardware purchases, add/extend on-premises desktop services, co-locate virtual desktops and protect on-premises Horizon deployments in VDI environments. Value: Quickly and easily provision services, scale and pay for capacity as needed and reduce upfront costs while delivering compelling TCO.
- Disaster recovery – For organizations that want disaster recovery as a service for on-demand site protection or that want to replace or complement existing DR strategies. Value: Achieve faster, simpler DR operations with lower secondary DR site costs for increased business resiliency.
- Application modernization – For organizations that want to modernize or innovate applications, VMware Cloud on AWS provides the ideal runway. AWS cloud capabilities and native services make it easy to modernize existing apps, develop new applications and build hybrid apps within a familiar environment. Value: Maximize the existing investments, while easily modernizing applications.
- Data center exit – For organizations that simply want to get out of the business of running and managing a data center by consolidating private clouds and moving to a public cloud, VMware Cloud on AWS delivers. Value: Re-focus IT skillsets on higher priority business imperatives and innovation, while reducing costs.
Logicalis: Your hybrid cloud partner
An award-winning managed services provider, Logicalis can help you focus on becoming a truly digital business that outpaces your competitors.
Our highly certified and skilled cloud professionals can help you develop, refine, refresh or implement a business-enabling hybrid cloud strategy that optimizes costs and utilization.
- Maximize existing investments and reduce risk, while achieving your digital transformation goals, by leveraging our long-time, trusted relationships with both VMware and AWS.
- Get the maximum value in the shortest time by leveraging our VMware Cloud on AWS solution competency.
- Add value to your VMware Cloud on AWS environment with our unique solutions and services.
Schedule a Hybrid Cloud Workshop today to see how your organization can achieve its digital transformation goals and become a digital business.
Eric Brooks is the Principal Architect for the Logicalis US Cloud Practice, responsible for working with customers to develop, design, architect and deliver cloud solutions with