Cloud, Partnerships

Next generation of VMware Data Services Manager highlights new VMware cloud enhancements

by  • 

The big news on the cloud front included the new version of VMware Data Services Manager, and the 5.1 version of VMware Cloud Foundation.

Today, at the VMware Explore 2023 Barcelona conference, VMware made multiple announcements upgrading their cloud platform, VMware Cloud Foundation. The most significant was likely the new version of VMware Data Services Manager. The new 5.1 version of VMware Cloud Foundation also contained some significant upgrade. VMware also announced that Google Cloud AlloyDB Omni will be the first third-party PostgreSQL-compatible database natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation, and that MinIO Object Store will be the first third-party object storage natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through Data Services Manager. Finally, to increase resilience in the face of ransomware and other dangerous attack, VMware announced that Intelligent Threat Detection, which will provide proactive AI/ML-powered encryption prevention and response is now in technology preview. In addition, VMware Live Recovery is a new offering that provides cyber and data resiliency for VMware Cloud.

“We are going to focus a lot more on what we have done to enhance our foundational infrastructure platform, which is VM Cloud Foundation, with our latest 5.1 release that enhances operational simplicity, scale and application performance,” said Prasanth Shenoy, VP of Marketing Cloud Infrastructure Business Group. “The 5.0 release came out at Explore in Las Vegas, and it was significant because it added the ability to make in-place upgrades without migration. The 5.1 version has new capabilities. We have doubled the GPU capacity to support the increasing number of AI and ML workloads. We can now support 16 virtual GPS per virtual machine. We have also natively integrated our vSAN virtual storage architecture, and that provides a 4x storage performance boost for storage intensive applications.”

Shenoy highlighted the importance of the Data Services Manager 2.0 release.

“Why is this critical,” he asked. “We have over 85 million workloads running on VMware Cloud Infrastructure today and we have 34% year-over-year consumption growth on these workloads. Only around 25% of these are databases, so it’s critical  for our customers to have a unified way of provisioning their infrastructure, providing unified data services for all their data beyond databases. They want to provides a consistent and unified operational model.”

Shenoy then explained VMware’s strategy for facilitating this.

“Our Data Services Manager  provides the unified control plane for WMare cloud customers to manage all data services, whether databases, objective stream, warehouse, caching or query,” he said.

“Data Services Manager 2.0 is now natively built to VCF, and what this provides is that you can rapidly provision data services and database services in minutes rather than hours,” Shenoy stated. “You no longer need to copy data to provide instantaneous replicas of the data, which drastically increases performance and scalability. Finally, it has built-in data protection to allow our customers to rapidly detect malware as well, as rapidly recover from any security threats they may have.”

VMware also announced the expansion of the data services that they provide, with Google Cloud AlloyDB Omni being the first 3rd party PostgreSQL-compatible database natively integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation through VMware Data Services Manager and VMware vSAN.

“We already support Kansas SQL,” Shenoy said. “We are now expanding to third party data and database services, starting off at Google Alloy DB Omni. This is truly critical because it has built-in performance for AI and ML workloads and the initial testing done by Google on VSAN ESAs to run AlloyDB has shown 2x performance on traditional databases and 100x on analytics that run on VSAN MAX. This is a tremendous improvement. This is in tech preview right now.”

VMware is also 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, which is well suited for data lake implementations and large-scale AI/ML use cases. MinIO Object Store is also available in tech preview.

Shenoy then announced new capabilities for ransomware recovery

“One is intelligent threat detection. How can we help customers detect hidden ransomware in their running snapshots even before the ransomware starts to encrypt their data. We provide a threat score so that the SecOps team and infrastructure team can proactively take action even before ransomware takes effect. We then use online snapshots to detect the safest recovery point. This  helps recover faster by seeing and stopping more threats.”

A second aspect of this is VMware Live Recovery.

“This is now a single solution offering for our customers to provide both DR recovery and ransomware recovery in a single subscription,” Shenoy said.

“We are also announcing a broader system of partners that has VSAN MAX ready nodes on their appliances – Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco, SuperMicro and xFusion,” he stated. “This expansion will create a really broad ecosystem of partners with certified MAX ready nodes.”