Virtualization company VMware this morning announced Cloud Foundation, an integration that the company says will combine some of its existing compute, storage and networking virtualization offerings, helping organizations run and manage existing on-premises applications on both private and public clouds.
It’s an effort by the leading company behind virtualization, a technology pioneered in the 1960s, to compete in the cloud arena by coordinating on-premises computing with computing in the public cloud.
Initially, Cloud Foundation will work with VMware partner IBM’s public cloud, though plans call for including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the future. The integrated products include vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX and SDDC Manager. Cloud Foundation is slated for general release by Sept. 30.
The announcements were made at VMworld, the annual VMware users’ conference, held this year in Las Vegas.
WMware’s relationship with IBM received special attention, with the companies claiming in a release that Cloud Foundation will “automatically provision pre-configured” software-defined data centers on IBM Cloud “in hours versus weeks or months.” Companies that have begun moving VMware environments to IBM Cloud include Clarient Global, Mariott International and Monitise, VMware said.
VMware was close to last among 10 companies vying for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) supremacy in Gartner’s August Magic Quadrant rankings. It fell well below Rackspace, which on Friday withdrew from the public-cloud arena as it was taken private for $4.3 billion by private equity firm Apollo Global Management.
