The need to innovate is here. And without a doubt, the current health situation has influenced the way organizations are driving towards digital innovation. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger kicked off virtual VMworld 2020 with a highly connected keynote, touching on the challenges the world is facing and the need to rethink how we do things.
During the keynote, Feeding America’s CEO Claire Babineaux-Fontenot shared the importance of digital innovation and how it is fundamental to her organization: “Our mission is to feed America’s hungry through a nationwide network of member food banks and engage our country in the fight to end hunger.” Readily available across multiple platforms, the organization’s MealConnect application matches members requiring support to a network of partners. “We simply could not function today without technology,” said Babineaux-Fontenot.
Pat Gelsinger shared his thoughts based on his recent discussions with business leaders from around the world. “What I hear is a deep sense of urgency, from hospitals on the frontlines to schools, airlines, banks, retailers, and carmakers,” he said. “All are under pressure to turn the corner and chart a path forward. They’re looking to engage with customers in new ways, searching for a strategic lifeline to stability and growth, and—at the heart of it all—software innovation.”
To achieve this vision, application developers need rapid self-service capabilities with dynamic access to resources on-premises and with public-cloud services. VMware Tanzu’s abstraction layer, with Kubernetes integration into vSphere, delivers a consistent experience to keep developers producing features to drive innovation. vSphere and Tanzu is the easiest path for IT operations to support developers with Kubernetes. During Gelsinger’s keynote, VMware’s Dormain Drewitz said it best: “The path to production shouldn’t be a trek through Mordor.”
Innovation of Applications
Modernizing applications challenges existing IT operations teams to explore new ways to support on-premises application-developer workflows. Kubernetes continues to be the front runner with container-based applications. And the Tanzu strategy is completely aligned to help organizations of all sizes with varying budgets and skills. Still, some VMware users are just investigating Kubernetes while others have yet to start. Either way, they’ll conclude that it’s a complete paradigm shift.
Akin to the early days of virtualization with VMware ESX, Kubernetes offers a completely new way to manage and provision infrastructure. This supports workloads within IT operations that cross over from on-premises to private-cloud and public-cloud services. There’s no question about VMware’s desire to make it even easier to run Kubernetes with vSphere. With Tanzu, VMware clearly recognizes customer needs by introducing four simple editions to get started quickly with additional features as you ramp up: Basic, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise.
VMware Tanzu Persistent Storage with Pure
Cody Hosterman and Jon Owings, Pure’s resident VMware and container experts, presented a session titled, “Hybrid Cloud Kubernetes with vSphere and Pure Cloud Block Store™.” They took a foundational approach to thoroughly answer the question: Why Kubernetes on VMware?
- Leverage existing investments
- Maximize VMware skill sets
- Simplify Kubernetes adoption
- Mobilize data between clouds
Their session included a demonstration of how quick and easy it is to move on-premises Kubernetes data on the Pure Storage FlashArray™ to Pure Cloud Block Store running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). A key benefit of this mobility into AWS is to leverage public-cloud resources for disaster recovery and dev/test. This mobility includes redirecting back on-premises as required.
VMworld Design Partnership
Pure also announced its relationship as a key VMware Design Partner today. This engineering partnership deepens our value with vVols to deliver the simplest all-flash, shared storage platform for vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu. FlashArray is fully integrated with VMware’s Cloud Native Storage CSI driver to provide:
- Persistent volumes
- Data migration and protection for Kubernetes
- Flexible datastores
There’s currently a ton of innovation taking place in the market to integrate into the Kubernetes ecosystem. Our integration with VMware Tanzu is to enhance the experience with simplicity, flexibility, and performance. We are placing significant investments to broaden our capabilities to support Kubernetes with VMware. Our recently announced intent to acquire Portworx, the leading Kubernetes Data Management and Services Platform, confirms our commitment to be a valuable part of the Kubernetes journey. It’s an exciting time for all of us at Pure Storage. Read Cody Hosterman’s post about it.
