As businesses distribute workloads across multiple clouds, they are extending out to the edge and pushing apps and services closer to where people, data and things connect to the digital world.
With this in mind, at VMworld 2021 this week, the company outlined how it will help customers navigate the shift to the edge and introduced VMware Edge, a product portfolio that will enable companies to run, manage, and better secure edge-native apps across multiple clouds, anywhere.
VMware Edge solutions include VMware Edge Compute Stack, VMware SASE, and VMware Telco Cloud Platform.
Sanjay Uppal, senior VP and GM, Service Provider and Edge at VMware, says a new type of workload is emerging, with edge-native apps that need to run at the edge to perform as intended.
“AR/VR, connected vehicles, and immersive gaming are becoming mainstream. 5G has made the use of collaborative robots, drone fleets and digital twins a reality. VMware delivers a trusted foundation, a multi-cloud edge, to help organisations move forward in the new edge reality,” he adds.
VMware defines the edge as distributed digital infrastructure for running workloads across a multitude of locations, placed close to users and devices producing and consuming data. Where a workload is placed at the edge is key to meeting the requirements of edge-native apps.
Far edge and near edge
According to the company, an edge-native workload placed anywhere between the cloud and the remote customer location and delivered as a service is called the near edge, while an edge-native workload placed at a remote customer location at the closest proximity to the endpoints is called the far edge.
Edge-native apps require a multi-cloud edge, and one that unites underlay services running on a service provider network, such as private connectivity, carrier 5G, network slicing, with overlay services delivered on top, such as SASE, as well as a compute services abstraction for the edge applications.
And all of this needs to be orchestrated by a management plane that provides consistent observability, installation, configuration, operations and management across all edge locations, says Uppal.
VMware Edge solutions, he says are purposefully designed for edge-native apps and their unique performance and latency requirements.
Dave McCarthy, IDC Research vice president, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services, says a number of transformational technologies, including 5G, SASE and open RAN, are converging at the edge, and the time is ripe for businesses to establish a digital foundation for their edge infrastructure.
VMware says it has key partnerships across the broad edge ecosystem, spanning public cloud providers, service providers, edge-native app developers, network services providers, system integrators, network equipment providers, near-edge hardware manufacturers, and far edge hardware manufacturers.
Share