Broadcom’s Five Biggest Announcements At VMware Explore

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan was a guest at VMware Explore in Las Vegas last year, but one year and $69 billion dollars later, it is his party as the newly acquired VMware By Broadcom showed off new cloud foundations, Tanzu, and AI products designed to simplify cloud deployments and deliver private, virtualized AI infrastructure.

Paul Turner, VMware vice president of products, VMware Cloud Foundation division at Broadcom, said the big news this year is around VCF, which is delivering better profitability for customers.

“It’s not just about virtualization anymore,” Turner told the press in a pre-briefing. “It’s about virtualizing your data center, your storage, your networking, your compute, the automation and operations you need as an admin team to deliver a service, and of course, the developer productivity that comes with an agile system.”

Turner said one of the challenges of legacy infrastructure is that it is failing to bring governance, agility, and control to its cloud estate. Different teams inside different environments means a loss of efficiency.

“In fact, if you look at the stats, it’s taking an additional 40 percent additional server footprint to actually run existing environments, non-VCF private cloud-based environments,” Turner said. Turner said that leads to higher costs. “That means if you translate that into a machine view, that means, if you translate that into a machine view, that it is costing you $2,307 more per virtual machine or server per workload.”

Pricing has been a massive issue with customers and partners seeing VMware bill’s rocket between 8x and 10x their previous bill.

But outside of VCF, VMware Tanzu is undergoing a transformation to speed app delivery for the workplace, according to Purnima Padmanabhan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division.

VMware Cloud Foundation

The private cloud platform can save customers 34 percent on their infrastructure costs, and increase infrastructure team efficiency by 53 percent, according to VMware by Broadcom.

The company said it unifies the cloud experience, making it 61 percent faster to deploy. It also results in 6-percent higher net developer productivity, the company said.

Additionally, it increased security team efficiency by 52 percent when using it, and while there were still outages, it resulted in 98-percent fewer hours of what VMware By Broadcom said were “impactful outages.”

All of this wrapped together, under the right conditions results in 564-percent return on investment within three years and it will pay for itself in 10-months, VMware By Broadcom stated.

Some of the key features include support for operations and automation including enhanced VCF import, and support for multiple topologies. It also has advanced memory tiering for NVMe storage, and native vSAN to vSAN data protection with deep snapshots.

It can lead to 40 percent better memory efficiency with NVMe tiering.

VMware Private AI Foundation

Vmware By Broadcom wants to democratize generative AI and spark business innovation “for all enterprises” with its new Gen AI offering.

It features an architectural approach that VMware by Broadcom says balanced the business gains from AI with the privacy and compliance requirements of industry.

The product was announced last year, but has new features debuting as it reaches market including the new model store that allows VMware By Broadcom customers to implement model governance and security. It lets them curate and provide secure LLMs with access controls, and protect environments from non-approved LLMs.

To push it over the finish line they have created a Private AI Open Ecosystem built on VMware Cloud Foundation that begins at the chip level and with partners at AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. It extends through server and storage thanks to partnerships with Dell, HPE, and Lenovo, and features systems integrator partners like NTT Data, HCL, Kyndryl, and Wipro,

VMware Private AI with Intel includes support for its Gaudi 2 AI Accelerators.

VMware Tanzu Platform 10

If you are in the technology business, the coin of the business realm is app development speed, according to Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager of VMware by Broadcom’s Tanzu division.

“Today every company is focused on app velocity because app velocity is equal business velocity,” she said. “When you need to respond to a market change, you change your app and get it back on the market. The distinction between high performers and low performers were spectacular. The time it takes from code commit to getting an app in production. It can be one to six months for low performers versus days or hours for high performers.”

To move everyone into the high performer category Padmanabhan said Tanzu is announcing up to 10 times faster read-write with parallel storage engine in Tanzu GemFire. More precise, scalable geospatial analysis capabilities inside Tanzu Greenplum. Enterprise-grade security encryption in Tanzu for Postgres Advanced.

“So what you have is a subsystem that truly gives you all the pieces to start building your applications and deploying them at scale and speed,” she said in a pre-briefing.

VMware Tanzu AI Solutions

Padmanabhan said Tanzu is getting into the GenAI ball game with platform 10’s release.

She said Speed GenAI app development with Sprin AI framework. Secure and deliver self-service access to large language models. Monitor GenAI apps with built-in observability for improved accuracy and performance.

Support on VMware Private AI Foundation with Nvidia LLMs.

IDC Says Customers Can Save Money Using VMware

Broadcom said it hired market research firm IDC for a sponsored study titled “The Business Value of VMware Cloud Foundation.” In it, IDC stated that interviewed organizations could realize benefits worth an annual average of $111,100 per 100 VMs - $16.8 million per organization.

Here are the steps IDC identified to saving hundreds of thousands of dollars with VCF:

First, the organization should establish flexible hybrid and multi-cloud environments that optimize spending on IT infrastructure and reduce their hardware footprint. Next find “significant efficiencies for IT infrastructure and security teams, which increases their productivity levels and allows for a focus on strategic IT and business initiative.”

Then “facilitate agile and effective development activities by minimizing infrastructure-related friction and choke points affecting development processes, thereby increasing overall development through put and aligning development activities with business objective.”

The last step is “Increasing overall business productivity through faster deployment of IT resources and applications, improved application performance and availability, and enhanced security and compliance in a complex threat landscape.”