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VMware CEO outlines laws of hybrid cloud

Pat Gelsinger points out three laws that will make the case for the hybrid cloud future: economics, physics and data sovereignty

Aaron Tan
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Published: 23 May 2019 10:09

The laws of the land, physics and economics have driven the IT industry to build consensus around the idea that the hybrid cloud will be the future of enterprise computing, according to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

Speaking at the VMware CIO Forum in Singapore today, Gelsinger said the laws of physics, for one, means enterprises will not be able to run a factory floor with robotic arms that require a 50ms response through the cloud.

“The physics just doesn’t allow it,” he said. “I was just meeting the CIO of Harley-Davidson and their factory floor needs a 40ms response time and all their data have to stay on-premise, so compute needs to be close due to the laws of physics.”

At the same time, Gelsinger noted that the laws of economics are driving such enterprises with on-premise infrastructures to turn to public cloud services due to the rising costs of storage, bandwidth and networking as they scale their business.

But the laws of the land, in particular data sovereignty rules, have led some companies to move workloads out of the public cloud to on-premise environments.

“The national petroleum company in Mexico is repatriating everything out of the public cloud because of a change in administration demanding for all of their data to be local,” said Gelsinger.

He said the combination of the three laws, which has elements of centralisation, as well as decentralisation of IT resources in the case of edge computing and the internet of things, point towards the hybrid cloud as the future of IT. “It will be hybrid cloud as far as I can see into the future,” he noted.

Consistent infrastructure

At the forum attended by more than 100 C-level executives from all over Southeast Asia, Gelsinger emphasised the need for enterprises to operate a consistent infrastructure as they move towards the hybrid model that spans on-premise and public cloud environments.

In making a pitch for VMware Cloud Foundation, an integrated software stack that combines compute (vSphere), storage (VMware vSAN) and network virtualisation (NSX) into a single platform, he said enterprises can run the same infrastructure software in their own datacentres and on public cloud services.

“You can run the software in your own datacentre, or we or our partners can run it for you,” he said. “This enables a hybrid cloud future, where it can be in your datacentre and in the widest range of public cloud alternatives available in the industry today.”

These include Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more recently Microsoft Azure, both of which VMware have been working with to enable enterprises to run VMware’s software on public cloud services.

Rima Olinger, AWS’s global alliance lead for VMware Cloud, joined Gelsinger on stage, noting that VMware Cloud on AWS continues to draw companies of all sizes across industries such as healthcare, financial services and technology.

As for use cases, Olinger said the common ones are around cloud migration, which can be application migration or a full datacentre evacuation, as well as disaster recovery and datacentre expansion where cloud services are used to augment existing resources.

Specifically in Asia, Olinger noted that the fast-growing market has seen enterprises using VMware Cloud on AWS to minimise the risks in their cloud journey.

“They also see it as a way to use existing tools and processes to build applications that differentiate their business and transform the customer experience,” she said.

Olinger pointed out that AWS has also been making its services available to VMware Cloud on AWS customers.

These include Amazon RDS which can be used to provision and run a relational database in on-premise VMware environments, as well as Amazon Outposts, which will support on-premise VMware workloads when available in the second half of 2019.

Read more about cloud in APAC

  • VMware’s cloud business unit CTO reveals how APAC businesses are using its hybrid cloud service to move workloads to the cloud.
  • Google Cloud’s new CEO, Thomas Kurian, unveils plans to turn his company into a bigger player in Asia’s booming cloud computing market.
  • In the next phase of cloud adoption, enterprises will need to manage multiple cloud environments, as well as data to scale up their use of AI, says IBM’s APAC CEO Harriet Green.
  • Oracle made a strong call for cloud at its inaugural OpenWorld event in Asia on the back of robust growth in cloud revenues.
  • The Australian arm of global engineering firm Laing O’Rourke signs up for Nutanixto run its core applications on a private cloud.

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