In the age of the cloud, there’s no doubt that managing IT is becoming more complicated as workloads become increasing distributed. To help IT organizations that have standardized on VMware software cope with that complexity, CenturyLink this week at the VMworld 2017 conference unfurled a CenturyLink Dedicated Cloud Compute (DCC) managed service based on the […]
In the age of the cloud, there’s no doubt that managing IT is becoming more complicated as workloads become increasing distributed. To help IT organizations that have standardized on VMware software cope with that complexity, CenturyLink this week at the VMworld 2017 conference unfurled a CenturyLink Dedicated Cloud Compute (DCC) managed service based on the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack of software running on servers from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).
As part of an effort to entice IT organizations to standardize on its software stack, VMware has been making a case of deploying a VCF offering that combines its virtual compute, storage and networking software into one suite of software. CenturyLink via VCF is now extending the range of VMware hosting services it provides by making available an instance of VCF that it will deploy and manage in any one of 32 data centers it operates across four continents. CenturyLink claims to already have more than 100,000 VMware virtual machines under management that can all be accessed via a programmable set of application programming interfaces (APIs) it exposes.
David Shacochis, vice president of hybrid IT product management for CenturyLink, says most IT organizations are looking to create a hybrid cloud computing environment that spans multiple private clouds for production applications. There’s interest in employing public clouds to develop applications and host some classes of applications. But most IT enterprise IT organizations don’t want to have to share infrastructure resources for a variety of performance, compliance and security concerns, says Shacochis.
Shacochis says CenturyLink will manage those public cloud instances on behalf of customers, including, he says, eventually the new VMware Cloud for AWS offering that VMware is slowly rolling out over the course of the next year.
“It’s going to be about providing the right mix of services,” says Shacochis.
It may take a while for IT organizations that have standardized on VMware to sort out where they want to run which application workloads. But in a lot of cases these days, when IT people talk about the cloud, they are really referring more to traditional managed hosting services than they are an actual public cloud.
Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.
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