VMware Explores Hybrid Cloud Strategies and Network Performance at VMware Explore 2024

Analyzing the seismic shift toward private and hybrid clouds - SiliconANGLE

Reorganizing cloud strategies: A new era for private and hybrid clouds A decade ago, public cloud was the de-facto standard, promising scalability, flexibility and cost savings. Given the explosion in data volumes and proliferation of workload types, companies are now reassessing cloud strategies and moving select workloads to private and hybrid clouds. What's the root cause of this seismic shift,and how will it impact artificial intelligence operations? "We saw that there was some labor shortages in the lift and requirements to get some traditional applications there," said Mike Gannon (pictured, left), president of North America at Broadcom Inc. "We started recognizing some cost concerns around once the application was there, was it the most efficient place to run it? We're starting to see a rebalancing of what is the appropriate workload to run at the cloud." Gannon and Stephen Elliot (right), group vice president at International Data Corp., spoke with theCUBE Research's Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed the strategic pivot in the cloud industry to balance cost, control and innovation as companies increasingly turn to private and hybrid clouds. (* Disclosure below.) Enterprises now recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud is unsustainable. Instead, they are looking at private clouds as a way to regain control over their IT environments. Within Broadcom, for example, VMware delivers cloud experiences on-premises, which allows organizations maintain the flexibility of the cloud while keeping critical workloads closer to home, according to Gannon. "That's an exciting concept because the IT practitioners who have optimized applications on current data centers are now part of the cloud experience," he said. "Whereas in the past, it was the developer ran off and they wanted to start optimizing the app, but the IT wasn't really involved in the decision-making. We're seeing this repatriation of not just workloads, but the talent pool that's now supporting this cloud experience." Cost efficiency and resiliency are now top priorities as companies map out their cloud strategies. Anomalous events, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the recent pandemic, forced a rush to public cloud to mitigate large expenditures while supporting remote operations. But recent findings show considerable repatriation of workloads from public clouds back to private clouds within the next year, underscoring the importance of cost management and the need for businesses to optimize their cloud spending to drive profitable growth, according to Elliot. "The recognition of where to place workloads and how to think about what these workloads mean to their business has elevated at a level we haven't seen before," he said. "One of the reasons is you look at COVID and how that's driven the decision-making relative to how do we leverage the technology architectures to drive our business. We're looking at opportunities relative to moving workloads back onto private cloud repatriation." Technology alone is not enough to drive successful cloud transformations. People and processes are equally critical. By fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, organizations can better adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs, both guests concluded. Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE Research's coverage of VMware Explore:

Network performance drives VMware's cloud strategy - SiliconANGLE

Network performance and IT economics help drive VMware's private cloud strategy A key focus of VMware by Broadcom at the Explore conference in Las Vegas last week centered around how enterprises can power network performance to drive GPUs and necessary data center infrastructure and deliver artificial intelligence. This need has been highlighted through an ongoing discussion within the tech community around the merits of various networking protocols, such as Ethernet and InfiniBand, to power high-performance computing. Key executives at Broadcom have made it clear that Ethernet is the way to go. "When you start thinking about AI, it's all about distributed computing," said Ram Velaga (pictured, right), senior vice president and general manager for the Core Switching Group at Broadcom Inc. "When you're doing distributed computing, it's a lot of GPUs and you have to connect them together with the network. That's what we do. We look at where AI is going into the enterprise, and we believe it should be built on Ethernet." Velaga spoke with theCUBE Research's Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. He was joined by Chris Wolf (left), global head of AI and advanced services, VMware Cloud Foundation Division, at Broadcom, and they discussed bandwidth needs and key trends VMware is seeing among customers interested in the private cloud. (* Disclosure below.) The good news for enterprise IT practitioners is that networking bandwidth has scaled to meet requirements, with a series of increasingly faster processors to power the infrastructure. "Networking bandwidth has been scaling quite a bit," Velaga said. "If you just look at our history of chips that we've been coming out with in the last few years, we went from 12.8 terabit chips to 25 terabit chips to 50 terabit chips. Most people can predict when we will have a 100-terabit device coming up. So, the network bandwidth is keeping up ... it's ready to take this challenge on." While the bandwidth may be there, an open question remains whether a majority of workloads will be in private clouds versus public. One of the key messages from VMware Explore was that the trend is toward private cloud, driven in large part by economics, according to Wolf. "We know and our customers know they're paying the public cloud premium for the velocity ... and there is a valid use case for that," Wolf said. "It's not all or nothing; we don't expect it to be. But that said, everybody knows if you have a well-run private cloud, and if you can simplify it, your costs on-premises are dramatically lower." This dynamic is leading to a redefined role between VMware and hyperscalers as AI workloads migrate to the private cloud. "What we're seeing is the customer demand for AI and alignment to our value proposition is now creating new pull for modern applications back onto our platform," Wolf explained. "That's changed the dynamic. We even have the hyperscalers talking to us as well about extending their services to the data center or edge on our platform. There's recognition, I would say, on their side that Private AI is a valid use case even for them and something that they want to address in the market as well." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE Research's coverage of VMware Explore: