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How has your business evolved over the past year? Has the pandemic changed how you plan for the future and how you view and execute sales & marketing strategies?

The pandemic really encouraged our sales and marketing teams to think more strategically about how we work with our partners. The sales and marketing team decided that we should fund all marketing campaigns at 100 per cent, meaning all co-branded activities that were pre-approved by VMware were fully reimbursed to the partner. The pandemic has also changed how we plan for the future. By encouraging our partners to maintain a hybrid approach when it comes to F2F events, we are able to capture an audience that traditionally wouldn't have been able to digest the content delivered in-person.

With many firms insisting staff return to the office for at least part of the week since the pandemic ended, how is your company operating in 2022? Is it a mix of homeworking and office working? Or fully office based?

The pandemic heightened awareness of the benefits of hybrid working. In UK and Ireland, we have offices for teams to come together a collaborate in-person, but with the pandemic, we recognise that home offices have become places of business, and every employee location became a workplace.

VMware recognises that when employees have more choice in where they work and live, their job satisfaction increases, which boosts loyalty and retention and increases business success, efficiency and morale.

The majority of our UK and Ireland workforce now have the choice to return to offices fully, a few times a week, or not at all. The flexibility lies with the individual and VMware's IT infrastructure fully supports this. With tools like Zoom, WorkspaceONE, Microsoft Teams and Office 365, most of our day-to-day responsibilities can be completed from home.

How do you keep your staff motivated? Do you have any special incentives/schemes that they take part in?

VMware motivates staff by offering each full-time colleague four "Take a Break" days, that can be used whenever they wish throughout the year to switch off and "take a break" from work. Allowing staff time to decompress, and re-charge is critical. VMware also offers great holiday benefits, whereby you can buy/sell holidays and also transfer up to 5 days over from the end of the calendar year to the following year if you haven't already used them. Once a quarter, VMware also has an EPIC day, which is a company-wide shut down. Again, this gives colleagues time to switch off, spend time with family/friends and be more present in their lives outside of work.

Certain teams within the business are eligible for commission and bonus schemes. For example in Partner Marketing we have an annual bonus scheme, whereby if the company performs well and we hit our marketing targets, we will receive a bonus. In addition, when a full-time colleague has been working at VMware for 1 year, they get access to the Take 1 Program.

This gives them $5000 USD to spend on further learning, development courses, degree programs and much more. This allows staff to upskill and polish their skillset, be it an Excel Advanced training course, or a Chartered Institute of Marketing Qualification. Everyone is given the flexibility to choose how they wish to spend the funds if it's for professional development. This can also include language courses and certificates from top Universities globally.

How have you managed to stay close to your partners and customers over the past year?

As mentioned below, we held our flagship partner event virtually last year and this year, which allowed us to bring together our partner community online for training, news and fun - including a live streamed music artist and some fun online games. We also have held our flagship partner and customer event "VMworld" virtually over the last two years, bringing together our partners and customers for learning and networking.

What have been some of the biggest challenges for the channel in the past year in your opinion?

Maintaining a sense of community with our partners has been a challenge. The VMware Channel team really get a buzz off of seeing our partners face-to-face. We did our best to bring partners together virtually at our flagship partner event called "EMPOWER" to help keep them enabled and excited on all things VMware. We would normally host this event in-person, but by hosting it virtually we are able to engage and entice partners with more content

What are you most looking forward to in the coming year?

We are looking forward to welcoming our partners and customers to VMware Explore Europe - that is replacing the VMworld events we used to have. This will be a face-to-face event held in Barcelona, with elements of the content being made available virtually, so a wider audience can join us.

VMware backup refers to the process of copying data on a virtual machine (VM) within a VMware environment to prevent loss of data. VMware backup, and by extension virtual server backup, is a common challenge for backup and storage administrators. Virtual server backup refers to the copying of data that is stored on a virtual server to prevent data loss.

Conventional backup software is a straightforward approach to accomplishing VMware backup, but it can result in resource contention; the additional resources you would require to execute a backup could compromise VM performance on the server being backed up.

VMware-specific backup products that can capture point-in-time snapshots of your entire virtual machine state can be used to address any resource contention issue that arises. This would allow for a fast & complete restoration of virtual machines. However, you would typically need to restore the entire snapshot when even one file is corrupted or missing. Newer VMware-specific tools can address file-level restore.

How to Backup VMware Virtual Machines

To back up your virtualization machine (including the OS, application files, user data, and settings) you need a copy of the original folder where the VM is stored. Follow the steps below:

1. Power off your virtualization machine. Leaving the VM running while copying it may result in a copy that refuses to boot.
2. Locate the target folder you want to copy.
3. Right click the folder and then click copy or press Ctrl+c.
4. Select your preferred destination location.
5. Press Ctrl+v or right click within the folder and click paste. You will see a progress bar that indicates the process is underway.
6. Once the process is finished, power on the copied VM. Workstation prompts you to specify whether you have copied or moved the VM.

If you indicate that you have moved the VM locally on the hard drive, all settings will be retained. On the other hand, the “Copied it” option will warrant the generation of a new MAC and UUID address to ensure that no conflicts arise in the network.

Three Methods of VMware Data Backup and Restore

VMware backup has brought about fundamental improvements in the world of data protection such as the benefits of encapsulation and abstraction. However, some challenges still exist, including how to ensure data consistency as well as addressing the issue of excessive consumption of this technology’s physical resources.

It is tempting to think that backing up your server is as easy as backing up the underlying Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) files since VMware encapsulates physical servers into just a handful of these large hard disk image files.

What’s more, backing up a virtual machine while it is running does not ensure that all the in-flight activity will be fully accounted for. This means that you risk data inconsistency, and therefore inaccurate information at the end, making the restoration unsuccessful.

The challenge of excessive resource consumption is a virtualization side effect. In fact, among the key reasons why you should virtualize your systems using VMware is to ensure that you concentrate resource consumption onto few physical servers, which reduces the amount of idle cycles suffered by most IT server infrastructures. Unfortunately, you also have to contend with the inability to have enough resources that will allow your data backups to run unhindered.

You should also know that your backups are at their most vulnerable points within VMware due to its narrow ability to handle excessive network or disk I/O. Your decision to virtualize to a physical server often hinders on the intensity of the network or disk I/O present.

Despite these issues, there are suitable methods to address them and provide you with benefits that, in some cases, could prove superior to a standard physical backup and restore. However, there is no proven best method of backing up or recovering VMware. For many administrators, the end justifies the means and what works for one may not necessarily work for another.

Method 1: Local Backup Agent Installed in each VM

In this traditional approach, a backup software agent is installed in the VM just like on a physical server. Here, data flows to the backup/recovery infrastructure, over the LAN, similarly to what happens if the agent is installed on a physical server.

The advantages of this method are:

• No procedural changes or special skills are required since the installation and configuration of the backup agent is similar to the process otherwise followed if a physical server was used.
• The restore process is also unchanged compared to a physical server file-level recovery.
• File-level recovery is possible.
• Full and incremental backups are possible.
• This method helps preserve the consistency of application data if you use specialized app-aware backup agents such as Exchange or SQL.

The disadvantages include:

• It is easy to overtax the host’s resources since all backups run over a single server.
• The backup agent fails to recognize that your servers are encapsulated into large VMDK files meaning that, from a disaster recovery standpoint, there is minimal value.

Method 2: Backup Agent Installed in ESX Service Console

In this method, you install the backup software agent within the designated ESX Service Console and back up each virtual machine’s underlying set of VMDK files.

The advantages are:

• You only require a single backup agent as opposed to an agent per VM.
• You can back up all your VMs by simply backing up the VMDK files.
• Fast image-level recovery is possible.

The disadvantages are:

• You require scripting to automate the shutdown, starting up, and snapshot of the VMs to ensure application consistency is maintained.
• No file-level recovery or incremental backups are possible.
• VMware plans to remove the Service Console from the ESX server eventually.

Method 3: VMware Consolidated Backup

VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) refers to a backup framework that offloads VM backup off the ESX server. The configuration eliminates backup traffic from a network and frees ESX server resources for VM performance. Other features of VCB include:

• Full and incremental file-level backups on top of full image backups.
• Support for Fibre Channel, network-attached storage, and local or iSCSI storage infrastructures.
• Enables backup management from a central point.

However, VCB is not your typical backup agent, as it is essentially a command line tool consisting of several Windows-executable programs. When you add scripts, these programs can also provide a framework for other third-party products to use.

VCB suffers from some limitations including the need for a dedicated Windows proxy server and third-party backup programs. Due to the release of vSphere 4, backup vendors are turning to vStorage application programming interfaces (APIs) that have replaced VCB.

Advantages of VCB-Proxy

• You can utilize only one backup agent for all your VMs.
• You can back up all your VMs by simply backing up the VMDK files.
• Fast image recovery is possible since the process involves the streaming back of a large image file instead of seeking many small files.
• Using the VCB Proxy server for your backup process reduces the ESX server’s overhead.
• This LAN-free SAN-enabled approach should, theoretically, provide a faster backup compared to a LAN-based method.

The disadvantages are:

• Automation and ease of use of VCB-Proxy relies on the capability of your third-party backup software.
• This method is complex to implement especially if you lack a backup software integration option to simplify the process.
• You will need to install a backup software agent in your VM if you want direct file-level recovery.
• When using Windows without VSS integration, VCB’s image-level backup is crash-consistent.
• VCB does not provide a mechanism to support Windows System State backups. You may be able to successfully do a full server recovery; however, it is not guaranteed if your system was in flux during the VM snapshot process.

What is VMware vSphere?

It is a server virtualization platform that debuted in 2009 as a successor to VMware’s flagship infrastructure solution. It is a complete platform for the implementation and management of virtual machine infrastructure on a large scale.

It is also popularly referred to as a virtualized data center platform or cloud operating system. It has the capability to enable your IT department to efficiently place application workloads on a cost-effective compute resource.

The operation and architecture of a virtual environment differs from that of a traditional backup environment in that it demands specific techniques. When it comes to backing up virtual machines in this platform, you need to utilize the strengths of virtualization if you want to maximize your backup capacity and restore efficiency. Also, you cannot rely on the same principles you used in your traditional physical environment when you opt for a virtual environment.

Below are eight suitable backup practices to follow:

1. Do Not Backup Your VMs at the Guest OS Layer

With traditional servers, you usually install a backup agent on its guest operating system (OS) that your backup server contacts every time it needs to back up data. However, this method is inefficient in a virtual environment since it causes unnecessary VM resource consumption, which impacts its performance as well as that of other machines running on the host.

Instead, you should back up your data at the virtualization layer. Here, you will use image-level backups for the large .vmdk file to avoid involving the guest OS. To accomplish this, you must use a backup app that is designed to work in the virtualization environment and that can back up the machine’s virtual disk directly without the need to involve the host or guest OS. This allows you to eliminate any unnecessary resource consumption while ensuring that your VMs get the resources needed for their workloads.

2. Leverage vStorage APIs

The vStorage APIs were introduced together with vSphere to replace the VMware Consolidated Backup framework, which was released with VMware Infrastructure 3 to assist in offloading backup processing from the host. They not only enable easier access to a virtual machine’s disk file, but also contain unique features that can significantly Improve backup speeds, for example, the Changed Block Tracking feature.

Changed Block Tracking (CBT) refers to a feature that keeps track of any changed blocks since the last backup occurred, so a backup app only needs to query the VMkernel to get information. Moreover, this operation means that there is no longer a need for the backup application to track changed data; this allows for a quicker incremental backup. You should use apps that take advantage of the vStorage APIs due to their efficiency.

3. Never Skimp on VM Backup Resources

If you want to have the shortest backup window possible, ensure that you get adequate hardware and software for your backup server to prevent operation bottlenecks. You need to have adequate network bandwidth as well as enough memory and CPU resources.

Your backup server does more than simply moving data from the source to the target storage device. It also does data deduplication and compression to reduce your backup sets’ sizes. All the processes require a lot of memory and CPU to keep up with the data flow.

Always follows your vendor’s hardware recommendations for the server. Do not economize on your servers, since backups can slow down significantly if the server lacks adequate resources. Test out the many third-party tools available for helping with backups before selecting a suitable one to use.

4. Schedule and Test Your Backups Carefully

Virtual environment backups can strain your resources due to the shared virtualization architecture. Thus, you need to plan your backup schedule to avoid stressing a single resource. For instance, never back up many virtual machines on one host or LUN concurrently. Instead, try to balance your schedule to prevent overusing any resource.

While scheduling prevents slow and degraded performance, testing allows you to know your backup’s recovery readiness. Testing is also important for troubleshooting problems, analysing your tools and deciding whether or not to switch products.

5. Learn How Quiescing and VSS Work

If your VM backups include transactional apps such as database and email servers, you should quiesce them to make sure that they are in a proper state for execution. This backup type is referred to as application-consistent.

Before the backup starts, apps are paused to ensure that any outstanding transactions and writes are written to disk. This step ensures that the server is okay and that no data will be lost if VM recovery is needed. Quiescing only works with those apps that support the pausing and writing of pending data whenever necessary.

VMware Tools has a driver that can work with Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to quiesce apps before backing them up. Necessity made other vendors come up with a similar driver to serve different operating systems. Ergo, always ensure that you use a supported driver and that your VSS service is enabled and configured to perform application-consistent backups.

6. Snapshots are Not Backups

Virtual machine snapshots, while helpful, should never be used as your primary backup means. Snapshots are okay for short-term backups of virtual machines, but know that you incur penalties whenever you use them.

You see, once a snapshot is created, all the VM’s disk writes are deflected to another new delta disk file making the original disk read-only. As data is written on the delta disk file, it grows in 16 MB increments, with each increment causing a lock on the LUN where it resides, which can degrade performance. Ergo, the more snapshots you run, the more you impact the performance.

What’s more, snapshots take up additional disk space as each one can grow up to the original disk’s size. If you run out of space on your data stores, you risk shutting down all your VMs. Moreover, merging snapshot data into its original after deleting it is a heavy I/O operation.

Snapshots create new virtual disks and link back to the original; therefore, some features may be absent. This can lead to a whole new problem of mapping between snapshots and the original disk. You should use snapshots sparingly and have them deleted when you longer need them.

7. Keep in Mind Fault Tolerance Backup Alternatives

Most virtualization backup products with image-level backups use VM snapshots to halt writes to the disk when backups are running. The Fault Tolerance (FT) feature uses two virtual machines (one primary and one secondary), which, though located on separate hosts, share the same virtual disk file.

Presently, the FT feature does not support snapshots. This makes the process of backing up FT-enabled VMs challenging and you will need to look for alternative methods of backup.

One method involves temporarily disabling the FT feature during the backup process to allow snapshots to be taken. Disabling this feature allows you to preserve the second VM. You can automate this process by using PowerShell as well as pre- and post-backup scripts.

Another method involves the cloning of the VM using either the vCenter Converter or vCenter Server to create another copy. Once you back up the new copy, you can delete the clone.

8. Back Up the Host and vCenter Server Configurations

You can easily rebuild a lost host or vCenter but you will lose your configuration information. It is thus advisable to back up the information periodically. With a backup host, you only back up the VMs and not the individual files residing in their management console. Ergo, backing up the configuration information makes it easier to rebuild the host later.

To backup configuration information:

• For ESX hosts: Use esxcfg-info Service Console command. It will output a lot of configuration information into one text file.
• For ESXi hosts: Use vicfg-cfgbackup command (part of the vSphere CLI). It will output configuration information to one text file.
• For vCenter Servers: You should back up the database containing the configuration information unique to the server including clusters, permissions, resource pools, performance data, alarms and much more. If successful, you can later reinstall the vCenter Server, point it to the backup database, and you will be back up and running. Remember to back up the folder containing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate located in the data directory. It contains the SSL certificates that vCenter uses to communicate with ESXi and ESX hosts as well as clients.

The Bottom Line

VMware has made attempts to address the backup challenges that are associated with virtualizing servers. The VMware vSphere 5.1, for example, uses VMware vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) that works with VMware’s vSphere Data Protection (VDP) or other third-party backup tools.

VADP replaces the VMware Consolidated Backup with an efficient agentless backup system that is based on virtual proxies and does not tax storage resources. In fact, it comes equipped with change block tracking to enable the backup of only those data blocks that you have changed since the previous backup. This reduces the workload of backup tools such as VDP.

What differentiates converged and hyper-converged infrastructure? We take a look at several systems in both spaces.

Building a converged infrastructure in a corporate environment means more than just replacing a few network devices. It requires an entirely different way of looking at a company’s network infrastructure and the kinds of IT staff needed to support it.

Traditional IT infrastructures were made up of the proverbial technology silos. They included experts in networking, storage, systems administration, and software. But much of that has changed over the past decade or so as virtualization has become a prominent technology tying networks and servers together.

Today’s virtual environments can be likened to the ubiquitous smartphone. Smartphone users generally don’t concern themselves with issues such as storage or systems management; everything they need is just an app. Similarly, storage management on converged infrastructure systems, such as EMC’s VMAX family, are provisioned essentially as an app as well, says Colin Gallagher, director of product marketing for the VMAX family.

Generally speaking, there are two approaches companies can take to building a converged infrastructure:

• The hardware-focused, building-block approach of VCE (a joint venture of EMC, Cisco, and VMware), simply known as converged infrastructure;
• The software defined approach of Nutanix, VMware, and others called hyper-converged infrastructure.

The most important difference between the two technologies is that in a converged infrastructure, each of the components in the building block is a discrete component that can be used for its intended purpose — the server can be separated and used as a server, just as the storage can be separated and used as functional storage. In a hyper-converged infrastructure, the technology is software defined, so that the technology is, in essence, all integrated and cannot be broken out into separate components.

Hyper-converged infrastructure: main differentiators

Let’s say a company is implementing server or desktop virtualization. In a non-converged architecture, physical servers run a virtualization hypervisor, which then manages each of the virtual machines (VMs) created on that server. The data storage for those physical and virtual machines is provided by direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS) or a storage area network (SAN).

In a converged architecture, the storage is attached directly to the physical servers. Flash storage generally is used for high-performance applications and for caching storage from the attached disk-based storage.

The hyper-converged infrastructure has the storage controller function running as a service on each node in the cluster to Improve scalability and resilience. Even VMware is getting into the act. The company’s new reference architecture, called EVO (previously known as Project Mystic or Marvin) is a hyper-converged offering designed to compete with companies such as Nutanix, SimpliVity or NIMBOXX. The two systems, EVO:RAIL and EVO:RACK, were announced at VMworld 2014 in August. Previously, VMware was active only in the converged infrastructure market with the VCE partnership.

Using Nutanix as an example, the storage logic controller, which normally is part of SAN hardware, becomes a software service attached to each VM at the hypervisor level. The software defined storage takes all of the local storage across the cluster and configures it as a single storage pool. Data that needs to be kept local for the fastest response could be stored locally, while data that is used less frequently can be stored on one of the servers that might have spare capacity.

Hyper-converged infrastructure costs

Like traditional infrastructures, the cost of a hyper-converged infrastructure can vary dramatically depending on the underlying hypervisor. An infrastructure built on VMware’s vSphere or Microsoft’s Hyper-V can have fairly costly licensing built in. Nutanix, which supports Hyper-V, also supports the free, open source KVM, the default hypervisor in OpenStack cloud software. However, as with any open source application, “free” can be a relative term, since there are other costs involved in configuring the software for use in a given environment.

Because the storage controller is a software service, there is no need for the expensive SAN or NAS hardware in the hyper-converged infrastructure, the company says. The hypervisor communicates to the software from the Nutanix software vendor in the same manner as it did to the SAN or NAS so there is no reconfiguring of the storage, the company says. However, the Nutanix software eliminates the need for the IT team to configure Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs), volumes or read groups, simplifying the storage management function.

Niel Miles, software defined data center solutions manager at Hewlett-Packard, described “software defined” as programmatic controls of the corporate infrastructure as a company moves forward, while speaking at the HP Discover 2014 conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. He said this approach adds “business agility,” noting that it increases the company’s ability to address automation, orchestration, and control more quickly and effectively. Existing technology cannot keep up with these changes, requiring the additional software layer to respond more quickly than was possible in the past.

For those looking to reuse their existing hardware to take advantage of a hyper-converged infrastructure, several companies offer approaches more similiar to the converged infrastructure approach of discrete server, storage and network devices, but with software defined technology added to Improve performance and capabilities.

One such company is Atlantis of Mountain View, CA, which offers software defined storage system that can convert direct-attached storage (DAS) into a pooled array, increasing the number of VMs that can share the storage and effectively creating a hyper-converged infrastructure. The technological secret sauce is Atlantis USX, a software platform that resides between the VM and storage infrastructures, the company says.

In August, Sunnyvale CA-based Maxta introduced the MaxDeploy Hyperconverged Reference Architecture built on Intel server boards and systems. MaxDeploy pre-validations include testing with server-side flash technology and magnetic disk drives to support a spectrum of cost / performance options, the company says. Maxta’s VM-centric offering simplified IT management and reduces storage administration by enabling customers to manage VMs and not storage.

Generally speaking, the investment in a converged infrastructure system will be made in conjunction with a greenfield project rather than a forklift upgrade, says Todd Pavone, executive VP of product development and strategy for VCE. Companies that consider a converged infrastructure will know already that they need to expand their computing environment so a pilot project with a converged infrastructure system will be cost-effective. Rolling out x86-based servers in a building-block chassis permits the company to test the new environment with new hardware that would have already been budgeted for expansion.

From a CapEx perspective, Pavone says, hardware is essentially neutral. The downstream savings is from lower support and maintenance costs.

New investments for a hyper-converged infrastructure differs because the hardware cannot be decoupled should the pilot program prove unsuccessful. Because the software is a key component to a hyper-converged infrastructure, initial entry costs could be higher, Pavone says.

But Duncan Epping from VMware’s EVO:RAIL (aka MARVIN) team suggests that upfront costs for converged systems need to be taken into account when considering upgrading a company’s infrastructure. For hyper-converged systems, he says integration with existing infrastructure and figuring out how to manage different platform needs to be included in the financial considerations as well.

While many of the vendors that provide components and systems in the converged market are established vendors, EMC, Cisco, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard, for example, Epping says, “Some vendors in the hyper-converged space are relatively new; can you trust them with your mission-critical workloads?”  

Not all of the companies offering hyper-converged offerings are new, however. Among the established IT vendors with hyper-converged products are the aforementioned EMC, Dell, Nutanix and Epping’s own VMware. Though VMware is a bit unique, as Epping explains, “EVO:RAIL is not a pure VMware offering, it is a partner program that enables customers to select a hyper-converged offering from their preferred vendor.”

Among the relative newcomers in the hyper-converged space are Gridstore, SimplVity, Yottabyte, Pivot3, and Maxta.

Converged infrastructure: main differentiators

There are two approaches to building a converged infrastructure, explains Bharat Badrinath, senior vice president of solutions marketing at EMC. The first is using the building-block approach, such as that used in the VCE Vblock environment, where fully configured systems — including servers, storage, networking and virtualization software — are installed in a large chassis as a single building block. The infrastructure is expanded by adding additional building blocks.

While one of the main arguments in favor of a converged infrastructure is that it comes pre-configured and simply snaps into place, that also is one of the key arguments against this building-block technology approach as well. As Chris Ward noted in his Tom’s IT Pro article To Converge Infrastructure or not, That is the Question, because all the parts are pre-configured, the users of the products have a predefined configuration. If the IT manager wants a configuration that is different from the system a provider offers, they are essentially out of luck.

The same holds true for the components themselves. Because each component is selected and configured by the vendor, the user does not have the option to choose a router or storage array customized for them. Also, the building-block approach ties the user in to updating patches on the vendor’s timetable, rather than the user’s. Patches must be updated in the pre-configured systems in order to maintain support.

It is possible to build a converged infrastructure without using the building block approach. The second approach is using a reference architecture, such as the one dubbed VSPEX by EMC, which allows the company to use existing hardware, such as a conforming router, storage array or server, to build the equivalent of a pre-configured Vblock system.

Converged infrastructure costs

As noted, each building block consists of separate hardware that is prepackaged and tested to work almost as a plug-and-play module. Unlike the hyper-converged infrastructure, the separate components of the converged infrastructure can be decoupled from the rest of the components and used in a standalone environment, Bardinath says. The simplicity of simply adding a fully configured and tested infrastructure block makes it easier to expand and maintain the network without needing to spend a lot of time reconfiguring the various components, he says. The blocks effectively snap together similar to the colorful Lego-brand building blocks found in a child’s toy box.

Pricing for converged infrastructure building blocks will vary by vendor, of course, but Unisys provides the following comparison: the base price for a Unisys Forward! system starts at $89,000. By contrast, a customer buying the same equipment and software a la carte would pay in excess of $100,000.

Companies that plan to migrate to the VSPEX reference design and use their existing server, storage and network hardware can work with a reseller or use a do-it-yourself approach to configure their existing hardware to meet the VSPEX design, he says. Such an approach would permit a company with a more modern network to migrate to the converged infrastructure at a lower cost. However, he says, most companies tend to deploy converged infrastructures in pilot projects, such as migrating from Microsoft Exchange 2010 to 2014, or in new data centers to reduce the hardware expense.

One advantage of the converged infrastructure is lower support and maintenance costs, he says. Data centers with hardware from a variety of vendors can run into finger-pointing problems when hardware issues arise. A Vblock is supported by a single vendor that takes responsibility for all of the internal components, regardless of the manufacturer.

“Technology is the easy part,” Badrinath says. “The people part is much more tricky.” Finding qualified engineers that can work on the wide variety of hardware from various vendors found in many data centers can be a real challenge, he notes.

By eliminating hardware requirements, customers gain additional deployment flexibility

SAN FRANCISCO, June 28, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Scality announced today that Scality ARTESCA lightweight, cloud-native object storage software is now officially supported on VMware vSphere/ESXi virtualization environments. This provides production-level ARTESCA virtual machine (VM) support for vSphere users, with functionality equal to that on physical servers, along with additional deployment flexibility. Virtual machine support is especially valuable in this time of supply chain issues that are causing long lead times for physical storage server hardware, which can delay enterprise priorities.

Click to Tweet: @Scality offers enterprise-grade support of ARTESCA on @Vmware virtual machine environments: https://ctt.ac/p01CE+ #datamanagement #datastorage 

Enterprise-grade storage has historically required hardware with integrated processing, memory and disk capacity. Scality was a pioneer in breaking through the needs for customized hardware with a 100% focus on software and an ability to leverage standard server platforms. Now, ARTESCA again breaks away from traditional storage requirements with the ability to support production-level workloads on flexible, commonly used VMware vSphere virtual infrastructures including support for VMware vSAN and live migration capabilities.

In addition to providing customers with more flexibility in deployment options, this enables partners and resellers to more rapidly deliver solutions to customers by sidestepping supply chain disruptions to provide faster time to revenue.

Launched in 2021, Scality ARTESCA is redefining object storage for the new cloud-native era. It provides both a small footprint at the edge and scalability for the data center. Designed for fast access anywhere data lives, ARTESCA uniquely combines lightweight, cloud-native object storage design with true enterprise-grade capabilities.

Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer, Scality, said: "Ongoing supply chain disruptions hamper business goals and growth. We're supporting ARTESCA software-based object storage on VMWare's ubiquitous vSphere environment to offer a solution that bypasses current supply conditions by eliminating new hardware requirements. Companies can move forward with the data storage and management they need."

About Scality

Scality® storage propels companies to unify data management no matter where data lives — from edge to core to cloud. Our market-leading file and object storage software protects data on-premises and in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. With RING and ARTESCA, Scality's approach to managing data across the enterprise accelerates business insight for sound decision-making and maximum return on investment. To compete in a data-driven economy, IT leaders and application developers trust Scality to build sustainable, adaptable solutions. Scality is recognized as a leader by Gartner and IDC. Follow us @scality and LinkedIn. Visit www.scality.com, or subscribe to our company blog.

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SOURCE Scality

The European Union is preparing to launch an antitrust investigation into Broadcom Inc.’s proposed $61 billion acquisition of VMware Inc., the Financial Times reported today.

Broadcom is a major chipmaker that supplies processors used in data center switches, Apple Inc.’s iPhone lineup and many other devices. The company has over the past few years also established a presence in the enterprise software market. To accelerate its enterprise software strategy, Broadcom last month inked a deal to buy VMware for $61 billion.

VMware is a leading provider of software for managing data center infrastructure and public cloud environments. The software maker operated as a subsidiary of Dell Technologies Inc. until last November, when it spun off into an independent company. About half a million organizations rely on VMware’s technology to support their information technology operations.

The Financial Times reported today that the EU plans to investigate Broadcom’s proposed acquisition of VMware over antitrust concerns. The EU frequently evaluates the antitrust implications of large acquisitions by launching so-called “phase 1” investigations, which usually take a few months to complete. In the case of the proposed VMware deal, however, officials are reportedly preparing to take a different approach.

Today’s report cited sources as saying that the deal will be subject to a lengthy “phase 2” investigation. The investigation could take more than a year to complete and “may ultimately derail the deal altogether,” according to the report.

The EU is reportedly preparing to launch the investigation after multiple organizations expressed concerns about the deal. The organizations are said to include, among others, trade groups that represent hundreds of VMware customers. They’re believed to be concerned that Broadcom could increase the price of VMware products or require customers to purchase Broadcom services.

Broadcom, meanwhile, is reportedly holding preliminary discussions with EU officials. The company is expected to argue that its proposed acquisition of VMware is unlikely to raise prices for customers, reduce the quality of the software maker’s solutions or hurt innovation.

When two companies that compete in the same segment merge, the segment is left with one less market player, which decreases competition. Broadcom and VMware for the most part don’t operate in the same segments. Broadcom is expected to argue that its proposed acquisition of VMware doesn’t constitute a merger of competitors and therefore wouldn’t cause antitrust issues.

Broadcom made two high-profile acquisitions in the enterprise software market before announcing its plans to buy VMware. In 2018, the company paid $18.9 billion to buy CA Technologies, which sells a variety of software products for IT teams and developers. A year later, Broadcom acquired Symantec’s enterprise cybersecurity business for  $10.7 billion.

At one point, the company also sought to buy data analytics firm SAS Institute Inc. in a deal that could have reportedly been worth as much as $20 billion. SAS Institute last year decided not to sell and instead began preparations for a 2024 stock market listing. 

Photo: Broadcom

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AWS Customers Can Purchase Tanzu Observability in AWS Marketplace

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 15, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced the company is empowering Centrica in its mission to help customers live sustainably, simply, and affordably by providing better visibility into the company’s cloud-native applications running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). VMware Tanzu Observability™ by Wavefront enables Centrica to gain better insights and trends into their platforms, allowing a much smoother path to innovative products and services. With the help of VMware, Centrica delivers metrics via simple dashboards on smart home applications which allow its customers to use energy more efficiently.

Tanzu Observability provides Centrica with a unified view of their diverse, distributed environments on AWS allowing them to quickly access actionable business intelligence (BI) and enable business-critical services to be up and running for their customers. With Tanzu Observability, the Centrica team has fixed issues that slowed down app development earlier in the lifecycle. Tanzu Observability also supports a more consistent approach to security, and has helped Centrica achieve a 25 percent reduction in monthly cloud spend by consolidating under-utilized resources, according to the company.

"We needed to monitor the performance of our AWS infrastructure and empower the development team with a better understanding of customer demands. Tracking trends and patterns in customer behavior is vital to develop new releases that are more relevant to customers," says Christopher Livermore, head of operations at Centrica. "We adopted Tanzu Observability to set up alerts, troubleshoot problems, and provide meaningful real-time dashboards to monitor system health. In turn, we were able to shift from reactive to proactive IT management and our teams were able to focus on delivering new services to our customers."

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Tanzu Observability gives organizations a comprehensive view of their entire infrastructure running on AWS, including AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), with simplified consumption in AWS Marketplace. With Tanzu Observability, both VMware and AWS customers can benefit from deeper visibility and additional insights into AWS, on-premises, and hybrid environments, at every stage of their cloud journey. AWS customers can easily visualize metrics, events, tracing, or other data sources as a first pane of-glass with out-of-the-box dashboards and alert conditions for faster issue detection and remediation with applied intelligence, across their entire stack.

"Businesses today are defined by the digital services they deliver. Tanzu Observability is empowering developers at organizations who are optimizing their application modernization efforts on AWS for speed, quality, and security in support of their journey to become a digital enterprise," said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, Modern Applications & Management Business Group, VMware. "Providing Tanzu Observability through AWS Marketplace gives our joint customers the flexibility to scale their observability needs as they progress along their AWS cloud journey."

"As our joint customers embark on their cloud transformation journey, VMware continues to offer more services through the AWS Marketplace to deliver additional value through AWS-integrated services," said Ashish Dhawan, Managing Director, Global Partner Sales for Enterprise Workloads at AWS. "Now with Tanzu Observability, VMware is making it fast and simple for AWS customers to purchase and deploy enterprise-grade observability to Improve application and business performance and accelerate app development."

AWS Marketplace streamlines customer adoption of Tanzu Observability via a consolidated purchase environment and integration with their AWS accounts, including already established terms of engagement. The process is simplified even further by enabling customers to prepay for VMware services based on expected usage. Organizations can use their existing AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) agreements to consume Tanzu Observability and other complementary VMware services to modernize their apps on AWS.

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About VMware

VMware is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. As a trusted foundation to accelerate innovation, VMware software gives businesses the flexibility and choice they need to build the future. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to building a better future through the company’s 2030 Agenda. For more information, please visit www.vmware.com/company.

VMware and Tanzu are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States, and other jurisdictions. This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220615005327/en/

Contacts

Kristen Butler
VMware Global Communications
Kstrem@vmware.com
650-450-1405