Alibaba Cloud and VMware have announced the next evolution of Alibaba Cloud VMware Service, a jointly developed public cloud service. With Alibaba Cloud VMware Service, enterprises across China can accelerate enterprise cloud transformation to support digital innovation with lower costs and risks.
Alibaba Cloud VMware Service enables enterprises in China to migrate and modernise applications faster and seamlessly move workloads between on-premises VMware environments and Alibaba Cloud at scale. Alibaba Cloud VMware Service is operated by Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. The service features the power of the entire VMware Cloud stack running natively on Alibaba Cloud’s advanced infrastructure to maximise performance, availability, security and increase workload density. Customers can use a consistent VMware Cloud platform that can support vMotion migration of workloads to Alibaba Cloud VMware Service with zero disruptions.
“In today’s app-driven economy, more and more Chinese enterprises are adopting a hybrid cloud model to accelerate their digital transformation” says Mark Lohmeyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware. “Alibaba Cloud VMware Service helps customers modernise applications, infrastructure and operations faster with demonstrable economic benefits and less risk.”
“Alibaba Cloud VMware Service enables enterprises to seamlessly migrate workload to cloud and reduce the costs of both operations and migration,” comments Ms. Lijuan Chen, Vice President of Alibaba Group. “It also helps enterprises leverage leading cloud technologies to further unlock the benefits of digital transformation.”
With the integration of VMware’s innovative technologies and Alibaba Cloud services, Alibaba Cloud VMware Service is an ideal cloud platform on which to run enterprise applications, featuring:
• Enterprise-Grade Compute, Storage, Networking Capabilities: ideal platform for customers’ enterprise applications. Designed for business-critical/tier-1 workloads with high availability, strong security, and granular resource control built into the core VMware Cloud infrastructure.
• Unified Infrastructure and Management: consistent infrastructure and operations. Achieve high visibility and automation through unified VMware Cloud infrastructure and management running and operating across on-premises and Alibaba Cloud environments supporting both VMs and containers.
• Security and Disaster Recovery: better protect apps and workloads with faster recovery outages. Create offsite disaster recovery site to safeguard VMs in any operating system and application, achieve fast and predictable recovery time objectives (RTOs), and automate disaster recovery workflows to reduce disaster recovery costs. Service complies with China’s cybersecurity regulations and provides extremely high security and availability to help enable business continuity.
• Comprehensive App Modernisation Platform: modernise enterprise applications faster. Combine Kubernetes, popular developer tools and frameworks, and access to native Alibaba Cloud services to achieve a fast path to production for applications.
• Attractive TCO: lower upfront migration and ongoing operating costs. Familiar vSphere capabilities maximise the value of the underlaying hardware resources. Advanced infrastructure enables on-demand scaling of capacity based on business needs. Costs of retooling, re-platforming, and retraining to move vSphere workloads to non-vSphere public clouds are mostly eliminated.
• IT Operations Efficiency: leverage investments in people and processes. Skills built up over years of VMware experience are directly transferable to Alibaba Cloud VMware Service. No retraining or new hires are needed to accommodate the entirely different operational processes required for running traditional or cloud native applications in a VMware-based public cloud.
“Seeing the benefits of the public cloud, we considered adopting hybrid cloud for our environments, but initially there wasn’t a consistent public cloud platform with the same VMware architecture,” says Mr. Ming Xu, deputy director of process and IT department at United Automotive Electronics. “After deploying the service, we solved many challenges including enabling seamless cloud migration with no negative effects on the core business, efficiently managing simultaneous environments on and off the cloud, and removing the high cost of data centre operations. The service also enhanced elastic scaling and rapid expansion of VMware resources on the cloud.”
