Working closely with Lenovo, VMware have the intention of conducting Project Dimension beta test come next month. This should be thought of as VMware’s infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that has the capability of running on customer’s data center, on business places, and at edge locations.
In August this year, a brief information about the project was released. VMware claimed that customers embrace the ease of spinning up VMware cloud on AWS which is known as a Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC) where there is an automated provision. During the interview, Kit Colbert, CTO of VMware’s Cloud Platform business unit confirmed that customers can still be able to deploy on premises data centre tech and pay for it just like any utility by utilizing the SDDC stack that runs locally and a hybrid architecture of cloud components.
According to Mr Colbert, they still need local compute for some reasons such as business continuity or cost and latency. In other words, there is a need of cloud experience by customers where the delivery of infrastructure is in form of as-a-service, but they expected this to be at their edge locations and just within the few selected data centres.
“As a managed service, VMware will be responsible for optimizing the solution for expected optimum performance, resolving services issues and troubleshooting, performing security updates and patching across the life of the system”, added Mr Colbert.
One of the main objectives is to roll out VMware cloud-like service and to provide both SDDC hardware and infrastructure as-a-service as customer’s Lenovo hyperconverged kit on-premises. The components of VMware include vSAN, NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud, and vSphere infrastructure stack.
In addition, Lenovo will also provide small rack enclosures, ThinkSystem server, and ThinkSystem RackSwityches.
Lenovo also said that their XClarity controller will be used to monitor and manage hardware form the cloud. The company also confirmed that they have a managed service team that will ensure that hardware fixes are provided and updates are done when necessary and as required. Lenovo will also carry out both delivery and installation.
Based on large, medium, and small configurations, the Project Dimension products and services should be expected to vary in terms of performance.
In a move that may not include some of Lenovo’s team of sellers who are still concentrating on making a buck by integrating kits meant for customers, Wilfredo Sotolongo, veep and GM of IoT at Lenovo’s data centre group complained that customers should be provided with more computer hardware, there is no need for customers to go out just to procure all the individual components, find an integrator to assemble it together, or load all the necessary software. All they need to do is to ensure that they subscribe to the Cloudservice and Lenovo will do the installation and connect to the VMware Cloud.
In its statement, Lenovo said that currently, the discussion with design customers is still ongoing and that it will formally accept the designs onto the pilot programme from next Month.
The company also confirmed that VMware has worked on Project Dimension with several hardware vendors, and it won’t be a surprise for Lenovo if others sign up- such as sister company Dell EMC. ®