Today, we are happy to announce the general availability of the latest version (v1.5) of VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions (DSE) that drives forward our strategic initiatives of infrastructure modernization, developer cloud experience, and heightened security and resilience.
Earlier in May, we announced the simplification of our services portfolio to deliver greater value to partners by standardizing our eco system to deliver a single VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) – a comprehensive, subscription-based private cloud platform, delivering a full stack that encompasses computing, storage, networking, management, support, and automation features.
For VMware Cloud Services Providers (VCSP) – the VCF offering opens doors of opportunities to not only service current clients but also to attract new customers by extending the platform’s capabilities, including private hosting, and delivering modern application services, developer-ready resources, and sovereign-compliant cloud solutions.
VMware Cloud Foundation’s unique design is to help users accelerate the journey every app needs to take while also helping to rapidly modernize them while delivering key services that deliver the greatest impact from each app.
Today, enterprises – across industry verticals – manage a complex portfolio of both traditional and modern applications that leverage real-time analytics and insights in order to make data-driven decisions to obtain a competitive edge. This data-driven approach is at the heart of business transformation with businesses extracting actionable insights by using structured, semi-structured, and unstructured database platforms with built-in analytics features like real-time processing, machine learning, and predictive analytics.
Scaling Applications introduces Complexities
As businesses and applications scale, handling the growing data volumes becomes a challenge for the IT teams to scale & manage databases while providing the right tools for the developers to speedup the development lifecycles all along maintaining a compliant security posture – thus impacting the business.
In this new release we have focused on delivering our strategy of making data as easy to consume and manage as we do for compute, storage, and networking today to provide the best in class Infrastructure for Data Intensive Workloads be it on virtual machines or on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) clusters.
In other words, this release empowers customers to provide development teams with a comprehensive suite of data services such as databases, object store, streaming, warehouse, caching, querying (akin to public clouds) that are deeply integrated with the rest of their VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure (i.e. vSphere, vSAN, Aria) and to deliver this as a native experience for VMware consumers while maintaining the same operational model and delivering scalability, resiliency, and security across all their data services.
Let’s see below what we bring to you in this release:
Integration with Data Service Manager
VMware Cloud Director extension for Data Solutions is now integrated with Data Services Manager – a native component of the VCF stack. This means that VCSPs can now provide managed DBaaS / DB management services for VM-based PostgreSQL database and a MySQL database, provisioned by Data Services Manager in addition to the TKG based deployment of data services like RabbitMQ, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB & Confluent Kafka.
By configuring Data Services Manager for VMware Cloud Director, Provider Administrators can publish VM-based database policies to the required tenants for consumption directly thru DSE UI. They also can lifecycle manage (create, update, delete, upgrade and backup) Data Services Manager PostgreSQL and VMware Data Services Manager MySQL instances through the DSE console.
Sovereign Ready Data Services
Another big theme of the release was to support businesses in regulated industries and bring data services on infrastructures that need to run in air gapped environments. Now, Data Solution K8s Operator can be installed in environments without outbound access to the internet
Enhanced Controls
The release also has enhanced control options that helps VCSPs to expand their data services offering beyond data mature tenants. Provider Admins can now access tenant DSE portal and perform tenant administrative operations, thereby bridging the skill gaps of tenants to achieve and realize the potential of data services.
Improved UI
We have improved user experience by providing access control enhancements that helps data instance owner and users with ‘Full Control’ permission to manage the access control of the instances they work with/on. This enables faster process times by cutting down the effort and ticketing steps to manage these instances by IT teams thus providing full control and freedom to the development teams.
We believe these enhancements by addressing key challenges and introducing innovative features reaffirms our dedication to providing solutions that meet our partners’ needs.
For additional reading please refer to the release notes here. For more information, please visit the product page.
Together with Broadcom, we are committed to driving innovation and delivering unparalleled value to our customers.
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