VMware builds its Telco and Edge Cloud portfolio

VMware, which already has a deep presence with communications service providers and enterprise customers, is expanding its automation and security capabilities for telco, Edge and IoT applications.

With its recent acquisition of Uhana, VMware will deliver a real-time deep learning engine to optimize the quality of telco network experience. Uhana provides a predictive artificial intelligence engine that optimizes the mobile network subscriber experience. Uhana intelligent analytics will complement and enhance the service assurance capabilities from VMware Smart Assurance, as well as other network data collection products.

VMware also announced that its VeloCloud SD-WAN solution is now used by over 100 CSPs globally and is installed at over 150,000 customer sites.

VMware is continuing to invest in OpenStack-managed virtualized telco clouds with a focus on making them operationally deployable, container capable and multi-cloud ready. Specifically, VMware’s VIO 6.0 will provide communication service providers with a common platform that has consistent policies in a multi-cloud environment. The latest release of VMware Smart Assurance with VMware Integrated OpenStack provides assurance capabilities that will deliver service impact and root-cause analysis with visibility across physical and virtual OpenStack networks, as well as multi-cloud networks. With VMware Smart Assurance and VIO 6.0, communication service providers will gain an automated approach to operational intelligence to reduce service impact and operational expenses.

VMware has also introduced a new Telco Edge Reference Architecture that provides design principles for developing and deploying an Edge-based cloud network based on VMware vCloud NFV infrastructure and VMware Integrated OpenStack. Leveraging VMware Integrated OpenStack, communication service providers can manage multiple Edge sites from a single centralized data center, thereby reducing overall footprint at the Edge while optimizing network performance.

“5G networks will deliver unprecedented levels of speed and ultra-low latency, resulting in new use cases for Telco and Edge Clouds limited only by imagination. CSPs and enterprises will benefit from the multi-cloud interoperability, uniformity in architecture and consistency in policies across private, public, telco and Edge clouds provided by VMware,” said Shekar Ayyar, executive vice president and general manager, Telco and Edge Cloud, VMware. “Furthermore, with the addition of AI-based learning capabilities from our Uhana acquisition, telco and Edge clouds will become significantly smarter in their capability to provide better service and remediate and correct faults quicker.”

VMware to acquire UHANA for telco AI

Friday, July 26, 2019  Mergers And Acquisitions, Vmware  

VMware agreed to acquire Uhana, a start-up focused on deep learning and real-time AI in carrier networks and applications. Financial terms were not disclosed.

VMware said it intends to add Uhana’s technology to its own Telco Cloud and Edge Cloud portfolio.

Uhana, which is based in Palo Alto, California, is developing a highly-scalable, low-latency, real-time stream processing and AI platform, deployable in the operator’s private cloud or public cloud infrastructure. It includes a high-performance stream processing engine that ingests subscriber-level network telemetry from a variety of data sources: the radio access network, the core network and optionally even the over-the-top (OTT) application directly, and processes the telemetry to provide real-time, per-subscriber visibility. It also includes an AI engine that discovers and predicts anomalies in the network and/or application, prioritizes them by their estimated impact, infers their likely root causes and automatically recommends optimization strategies for the best subscriber experience.

In a blog posting, Uhana co-founder Sachin Katti writes: "After the deal closes, with the addition of Uhana’s technology to VMware’s Telco and Edge Cloud portfolio, Uhana will further support VMware’s ability to serve the telecom industry and deepen intelligence in the journey to 5G. Uhana’s technology will empower intelligence and analytics for the VMware Smart Assurance and VMware Smart Experience products."

http://www.uhana.io/about
https://blogs.vmware.com/telco/vmware-to-add-uhana-to-telecommunications-portfolio-harnessing-the-power-of-ai-for-mobile-networks/

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VMware Tanzu portfolio targets Kubernetes

VMware unveiled a portfolio of products and services for building, running and managing software on Kubernetes.

VMware Tanzu includes a technology preview of Project Pacific, which is focused on transforming VMware vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform—unlocking its potential for the hundreds of thousands of vSphere customers. This includes:

• vSphere with Native Kubernetes - embedding Kubernetes into the control plane of vSphere will transform the platform—enabling it to converge containers and VMs onto a single platform. Project Pacific will also add a container runtime into the hypervisor. New ESXi native pods will combine the best properties of Kubernetes pods and VMs to help deliver a more secure and high-performance runtime for mission-critical workloads.
• App-focused Management - Project Pacific will enable app-level control for applying policies, quota and role-based access to developers. With Project Pacific, IT will have unified visibility into VMware vCenter Server for Kubernetes clusters, containers and existing VMs, as well as apply enterprise-grade capabilities such as High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and vMotion at the app level.
• Dev and IT Ops Collaboration - IT operators will use vSphere tools to deliver Kubernetes clusters to developers, who can then use Kubernetes APIs to access SDDC infrastructure. With Project Pacific, both developers and IT operators will gain a consistent view via Kubernetes constructs in vSphere.
• Enterprises that want to start down the path of Kubernetes on vSphere today can adopt VMware PKS now. VMware PKS is the company’s flagship Kubernetes offering, used by many of the largest and most complex enterprises worldwide, helping them to deploy, run and manage Kubernetes for production across multiple clouds.

VMware Tanzu will offer a "Mission Control" single point of control to manage all their conformant Kubernetes clusters regardless of where they are running—vSphere, public clouds, managed services, packaged distributions and do-it-yourself (DIY) Kubernetes. The new service will offer broad capabilities powered by VMware’s extended product portfolio.  VMware Tanzu Mission Control will make it simple for operators to apply policies for access, quotas, back-up, security and more to individual clusters or to groups of clusters that span environments.

VMware Tanzu products and services also include :

• Pivotal – VMware recently announced a definitive agreement to acquire Pivotal. Pivotal offers a comprehensive platform and deep connection to the developer community. Every month, Spring Initializr is used by developers to start 1.5 million new projects, and Spring Boot is downloaded more than 75 million times. Pivotal Application Service (PAS) has more than 750,000 enterprise production instances running globally, and Pivotal has announced that PAS and its components, such as the Pivotal Build Service and Pivotal Function Service, are being developed to run on Kubernetes.
• Bitnami – Bitnami provides the largest catalog of pre-built, scanned, tested, and continuously maintained application content for Kubernetes clusters to an audience of 2.5 million developers. VMware today introduced Project Galleon—a beta offering that will enable enterprise IT to deliver customized, up-to-date application stacks and formats to their end developers, that are multi-cloud ready.
• ISV Ecosystem – VMware continues to expand its broad ISV ecosystem to offer value-add services through Kubernetes and build applications on Kubernetes that can be made available via the Bitnami Community Catalog. VMware has also significantly grown the number of partners that have completed the VMware PKS Solution Competency.

“Organizations are seeking a partner to meet them where they are today and guide them as they move to modern applications,” said Raghu Raghuram, chief operating officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “We’re positioned to help customers succeed along each step of their journey—building their applications with the addition of Pivotal’s developer platform, tools and services; running their applications with the groundbreaking Project Pacific which will transform vSphere into a Kubernetes native platform; and managing their growing Kubernetes footprint across environments from a single control point with VMware Tanzu Mission Control.”

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