Article Three Key Highlights Cloud Service Providers Must Know from VMware Explore
By Insight UK / 12 Dec 2022 / Topics: Cloud
By Insight UK / 12 Dec 2022 / Topics: Cloud
More than 9,000 IT professionals joined VMware Explore Europe in Barcelona this year. One week with more than 600 sessions about current developments in a multi-cloud era. We picked three main highlights to share with our service providers, in case you missed it...
One of the key highlights was the keynote content around the importance of VMware Sovereign Cloud. And with it an interesting proposition for service providers to deliver sovereign cloud solutions under national law and regulations.
Data protection and privacy are hot topics in a hybrid, multi-cloud world. As a service provider, you increasingly manage and process sensitive and regulated workloads for customers in public clouds with foreign origins. Many public clouds now have regions in different countries, so customer data reside locally, but are they fully covered by local legislation?
Here is where the difference between data residency and data sovereignty comes in. In short, data residency is about where data are physically and geographically located. Data sovereignty goes further and also involves the laws and regulations of the country where the data resides. So, while the data itself may be located locally, this does not automatically apply to account information and metadata. This has been further compounded by the Cloud data act in the USA.
An example? If the geolocation is located in Europe, but owned by a US company, US authorities can in certain cases still enforce access to the data under US law. Certainly not everyone thinks about this when storing data in the cloud, especially if the price is much lower, which is often the case with a US footprint.
With the availability of VMware Sovereign Cloud all data are covered by local or national laws and protected from foreign access. This is a big improvement for data control, security and compliance and a huge opportunity for you to extend your service offering to delivering sovereign clouds.
Another hot topic was multi-cloud management. Many of our service providers have embraced VMware Tanzu as a fully compliant, multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster management offering. In one overview, you manage the migration, development or deployment of applications and workloads of all your customers, whether on premises, in AWS, Azure or Google, in hybrid cloud environments or at the edge.
But the world is changing fast and so are the demands of your customers. VMware announced that, from 3 November 2022, VMware Tanzu Basic has been retired and replaced by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid which gives additional runtime with Fluent Bit, Prometheus, Grafana, Contour included, Velero, Antrea, HA Proxy, Calico, and Harbor. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is included by default within Flex Core at no additional cost.
Tanzu Basic vs. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid comparison
Another announcement was that Tanzu Mission Control is now available as a standalone as well as SaaS offering in Tanzu Standard to simplify multi-cloud and Kubernetes cluster management.
Of course, sustainability could not be ignored with VMware taking significant steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their operations.
A year ago, VMware introduced the first Sustainability Dashboards in vRealize Operations 8.6. With these, you can see how much CO2 you save with computer virtualisation and how you further optimise this by improved management of idle workloads. In Barcelona, VMware announced the Aria Operations Cloud release of October 2022. With an interesting perspective for service providers.
As a service provider, you have a responsibility to work greener too, and with you, your customers. But how do you calculate exactly in which areas you can improve your carbon footprint? And how do you then relate that to all your different customers?
VMware has now introduced metrics – mostly available in Aria Operations natively – to help you do just that: the VMware Green Score. The Green Score calculates the carbon footprint in your data centre on five components:
With the data you collect in the Green Score Dashboard, you can see exactly where you can find optimisations to reduce your energy consumption and improve the overall Green Score. Once you have identified this footprint, you can make actionable recommendations for each of your customers on which specific components need to be optimised. In this way, you will also help your customers achieve their green goals and save costs.
VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations) Green Score Dashboard
If you want to know more about VMware’s unified multi-cloud management approach, Sovereign Cloud, the Green Score Dashboard or anything else from VMware Explore, contact one of our cloud specialists for a talk. As a VMware Aggregator Partner, Insight is able to offer guidance on VMware’s portfolio within the VMware Cloud Provider and Managed Service Provider Programs.
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