VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona Highlights: Powerful, customer-focused private cloud strategies take center stage

Delivering cloud sovereignty and accelerating IT modernization

Thanks to everyone who joined us for VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona! Attendees exchanged ideas and perspectives in informative discussions, received answers to business-critical questions, and gained a greater understanding of the benefits of private cloud, private AI and much more. So what was revealed and discussed? A lot. Here’s a recap of key topics with links to learn more.

So, is private cloud just a fancy name for on-premises infrastructure? Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan highlighted that it’s much more than that. Take cloud sovereignty, which is top of mind for many businesses and organizations. 

The importance of having the right data strategy and control of assets is increasing demand for sovereign cloud services. Nowhere is this more evident than in the European Union, which strives to foster innovation while supporting European businesses with regulatory frameworks designed to offer data protection as well as competitive advantage.

Broadcom is aligned with this goal.Our approach to sovereign cloud enables customers to continue to innovate and retain control of their data. As Hock explained, private cloud and private AI serve as the framework for the future of the enterprise — and governments — in this endeavor. But don’t think of private cloud as “a place” or geographical location; it’s a platform and an operating paradigm for any data center.

Broadcom defines private cloud as a cloud operating model that enables agility and innovation, while ensuring privacy and control that can be deployed anywhere you need it with interoperability and portability of apps and data. We offer solutions that prioritize data sovereignty and regulatory compliance, empowering European organizations to build their digital futures with confidence in their ability to control their own data. Our sovereign cloud solutions help ensure that data remains within your organization's control and complies with national laws. This is particularly important as more organizations plan to leverage AI.

The emergence of sovereign AI as a requirement increases the stakes, as well as the potential benefits of providing innovation, agility, and control. Explore 2024 Barcelona revealed collaboration among Broadcom, advisory bodies, and strategic partners to launch AI-powered services that honor data privacy and sovereignty. This collaboration enables customers to leverage AI within a framework that reflects regulatory and ethical considerations, a crucial aspect for organizations aiming to integrate AI into their operations responsibly.

This kind of work isn’t something you just stick a label on and declare it a solution. There’s a lot of work that goes into it to make it a real offering. For a glimpse of that, you can read more below. But first, the news!

Announcements and new innovations

During Explore 2024 Barcelona, we unveiled significant innovations, services, and partnerships that will support cloud transformations and the integration of AI within the enterprise. This includes new solutions and Advanced Services designed to help customers achieve critical business results through VMware Cloud Foundation, the launch of the VeloRAIN architecture to enhance AI-driven networks, and the expansion of the partner ecosystem through Titan (part of the Broadcom Advantage Partner Program for VeloCloud Partners, which benefits Managed Service Providers). 

Other announcements featured enhancements to VMware vDefend and VMware Avi Load Balancer to improve protection against cyber threats and optimize workload performance, and the general availability of VMware Tanzu Platform 10, which we first introduced in August at VMware Explore Las Vegas.

Expanding Ransomware and Disaster Recovery Options

From ransomware to other disasters, cyber resilience has become a top priority for many organizations concerned about their ability to protect against and recover from a significant cyber event. Explore Barcelona had many sessions and announcements about protection, and we made an important announcement regarding plans to enhance VMware Live Recovery support for Google Cloud VMware Engine as a cyber and disaster recovery environment.

VMware Live Recovery is an Advanced Service for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) that delivers unique capabilities for cyber and disaster recovery, including guided workflows, safe validation of recovery points, live behavioral analysis, and network isolation. A key part of this is having an available Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE). At launch, VMware Live Recovery was able to use VMware Cloud on AWS as an IRE, which is still available. At Explore Las Vegas, plans were announced for customers to use their own environments as an IRE and now this has extended to include Google Cloud VMware Engine.

This announcement not only demonstrates increased innovation in the most critical areas of cyber resilience, but also increased innovation with our hyperscale partners.  

Driving successful customer outcomes

One of the benefits of VMware Explore is the opportunity to hear from our customers. Understanding their challenges and successes helps us continually improve and innovate.

 At Explore Las Vegas, Charlotte Pipe and Foundry shared how VCF allows them to focus on meaningful digital transformation that advances their business. Server Administrator Rodney Lee Bernhardt referred to the power of automation and the ability of VCF to work seamlessly across their ecosystem of tools.

At Explore Barcelona, Notruf Niederösterreich shared its experience as the command center for 911 emergency services in Austria’s Lower Austria region. In catastrophic situations, system reliability is a must. The Notruf team relies on VCF to help ensure that every call is met with the dependability and speed that emergency response requires.

Krish Prasad, general manager of Broadcom’s VCF Division, emphasized the importance of understanding how customers rely on capabilities and features of the platform to ensure that these needs and benefits are reinforced in the innovation roadmap.

New VMware Tanzu releases provide more value

Many of our announcements relate to the infrastructure that applications need to run. But there were also exciting announcements that show how our offerings improve how modern custom and packaged applications are developed, operated, and optimized at scale. Two that generated a lot of interest at Explore Barcelona were expansions of Advanced Services offerings: VMware Tanzu Data Services and VMware Tanzu Platform 10.

Modern application teams are used to consuming a data service from their cloud provider, but that has been a struggle to provide in a curated and private way. To help solve this challenge, we announced VMware Tanzu Data Services, which will provide fast, self-service access to popular OSS data engines that developers expect—like Postgres, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and Valkey—with 24/7 enterprise support from leading industry experts. Enterprise customers are looking for a single vendor with the expertise to support these open source data engines and wade through the hundreds of combinations of extensions to curate and validate an enterprise-grade solution across VMs, Kubernetes, or bare metal as they move to replace proprietary data solutions. Tanzu Data Services offers all of this as well as simplified and secure automated lifecycle management for seamless operations. Tanzu Data Services directly integrates with the VCF tools private cloud admins know well to deliver data services to their line-of-businesses, allowing developers to consume these data services in minutes.

From its first announcement at Explore Las Vegas to the general availability announcement at Explore Barcelona, the release of VMware Tanzu Platform 10 establishes new, unified services across Cloud Foundry foundations and Kubernetes clusters to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to bring to production new applications, including GenAI apps. Additionally, new capabilities lower infrastructure costs, improve the security, observability and governance of applications already in production, and extend the Cloud Foundry development experience to Kubernetes. This is the first release of Tanzu Platform for self-managed, air-gapped environments, optimized for VMware Cloud Foundation-based private clouds. It also supports deployments in public cloud. 

Learn more about how VMware Tanzu Platform 10 can ease the tensions between IT ops and dev teams and boost your modern app delivery.

Product advancements that increase performance and security

Other key announcements at Explore Barcelona showcased advancements in VMware vDefend and VMware Avi Load Balancer. These advancements help strengthen security for east-west traffic and optimize performance within the data center, private cloud, and Kubernetes environments. Let’s take a closer look.

Every day, many security admins ask themselves, “What just happened?” or “What should I do?” Answering these questions has become a lot easier with the introduction of Intelligent Assist for VMware vDefend. Intelligent Assist is a generative AI-powered tool that boosts the efficiency of threat detection, analysis, and remediation. It integrates GenAI into security operations, which is becoming increasingly popular among organizations that want to advance their defense strategies. 

Designed for IT teams of varying skill levels, Intelligent Assist features a natural language interface that offers clear explanations, actionable insights, and automated responses for critical alerts. This simplifies the interaction between virtualization, network security, and SOC teams with detailed, contextual threat information. This enables quick remediation actions through simplified processes that previously involved complex, multi-product workflows.

Additionally, the explainability feature of Intelligent Assist translates detection events into plain English, aiding teams in quickly understanding and addressing threats. The system’s automation capabilities also allow for either targeted or extensive remediation based on an organization's risk tolerance and the impact of the threat.

VMware Avi Load Balancer has enhanced functionality in VCF and Kubernetes environments. These updates emphasize automation, resilience, and future-proofing of operations. Customers will benefit from large-scale deployment support for workloads, improved application resiliency via better failure management, enhanced gateway API support for Kubernetes, accelerated migration from legacy load balancers, and upgraded intelligence with dry run capabilities.

Robust AI networking beyond the data center

As enterprises continue to adopt AI technologies into their IT environments, there is a growing need to be able to connect and support AI and non-AI workloads. AI network traffic is different than other traffic, with different needs.

In response, Broadcom has evolved its VeloCloud portfolio to help businesses handle increasing AI workloads in new and existing applications, with these workloads being autonomous, orchestrated, and data-consuming at the source. Sanjay Uppal, VP of Broadcom’s VeloCloud Division, highlighted VeloRAIN (Robust AI Networking) as the foundation for meeting enterprise AI workload demands, improving application-based quality of experience and security. 

VeloRAIN innovations enhance how enterprises build and manage AI-driven networks. These advancements include AI- and ML-based detection of encrypted application traffic, which simplifies the identification and prioritization of new edge AI applications, improving quality of service (QoS) and user experience for modern applications. Additionally, VeloRAIN will introduce advanced channel estimation intelligence for wireless links, including 5G and satellite, ensuring fiber-like QoS even in dynamically changing network conditions. It will also accelerate network setup times in branch offices or remote sites.

VeloRAIN will feature an AI-driven dynamic policy framework for application prioritization, automatically assigning business priorities to new applications and streamlining network management. This includes Dynamic Application-Based Slicing (DABS), which guarantees quality of experience (QoE) per application across multiple networks, regardless of their support for network layer slicing. DABS will also incorporate user profiles, allowing traffic prioritization based on user identity and attributes. This will ensure key users receive optimal QoE and enhance overall performance and user experience. These innovations will provide enterprises with unprecedented visibility, prioritization, and automation, to enable more efficient operations and superior user experiences.

The latest on VeloCloud SD-WAN Edge 4100 and 5100

High-capacity, scalable, and future-proof network solutions are essential for large enterprises. The latest VeloCloud SD-WAN Edge 4100 and 5100 appliances are designed for large branch sites, regional hubs, data centers, and AI networking, delivering significant scalability and flexibility improvements. These advanced AI-ready edge appliances can scale up to 100 Gbps.

The VeloCloud Edge 4100 appliance will offer up to 30 Gbps throughput and can connect up to 12,000 tunnels. That’s a maximum 300 percent improvement in performance and scalability over its predecessors (3400 & 3800/3810). 

The VeloCloud Edge 5100 appliance will offer up to 100 Gbps throughput and can connect up to 20,000 tunnels, introducing a net-new entry for super high-performance and scalable deployments.

Both VeloCloud Edge 4100 and 5100 appliances will simplify the network architecture by requiring the deployment of fewer devices to scale network and security services to support growing business needs.

They deliver outstanding value-to-cost ratios, empowering businesses to boost network performance and security without excessive expenses. Their capacity to manage substantial data traffic and tunnels, along with advanced features like Enhanced Firewall Service, enables enterprises to consolidate networking and security into a single, future-proof solution.

Opportunities for cloud service providers

Did you know that sovereign cloud definitions are constantly being updated? As technology advances so fast, it is critical that our understanding of risk and impact advances with it.

Recent research indicates that although Europe is making strides toward establishing sovereign cloud services, there’s still more work to do. In his keynote, President and CEO Hock Tan outlined how VMware Cloud Foundation “provides the ultimate sovereign cloud solution,” including a local cloud provider that delivers services based on national laws. Broadcom has the largest data-sovereignty solutions footprint with more than 50 approved partners that provide a structured approach to meeting sovereignty standards.

Defining data sovereignty

Achieving data sovereignty means more than just storing data within geographical borders. It requires a holistic approach to security, privacy and interoperability. Broadcom's approach with VMware Cloud Service Providers, who have sovereign certification, provides a robust and adaptable path for global customers to meet stringent and tailored sovereign cloud requirements. By using these provider services, customers can be assured that their data remains secure, private, and easily transferable across different systems and regions.

Sovereign cloud providers prioritize data security and compliance with various regulations, such as GDPR, BDSG, CCPA, HIPAA, and more into the core of their solution offerings. This helps organizations match services to the security and compliance regimes they need to observe. Organizations can store sensitive data domestically while utilizing strong encryption, zero-trust architectures, and ongoing monitoring and auditing. The solutions help ensure protection against unauthorized access, breaches, and malicious threats, while also meeting specific local and industry regulatory demands. By partnering with these providers, organizations can keep their data entirely within legal boundaries and safeguard it with some of the most sophisticated security measures available, and demonstrate transparency over data management and control.

But that’s not all. Whether as a strategic choice or due to a compliance requirement, many organizations need to demonstrate the ability to back out of services and move workloads to a different cloud when required. With VMware Cloud Foundation as a unifying consistent technology platform, workloads benefit from both interoperability and portability across all private cloud environments.

Can’t get enough of new cloud tech?

Even as a summary, that was a lot of information and news! Yet there was so much more, too much to fit into one post. You can “explore” your own full recap here.

Explore Barcelona was a wonderful experience that hummed with the enthusiasm of the attendees to learn more, discuss, question, challenge, and share how they will benefit from what they discovered. We hope to see you at Explore next year!

Even with this year’s Explore events behind us, the next article is already in development because innovation doesn’t take a break. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to VMware Cloud Connect to keep up with the latest, read stories from your peers, and be in the best position to lead your organization on the next steps in its journey.