Broadcom Advances Private Cloud Vision at VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona

When Broadcom acquired VMware at the end of 2023, there were initial concerns that it could slow the pace of innovation. That's apparently not the case.

At the VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona event this week, Broadcom announced a series of enhancements to its VMware portfolio. As was the case at the U.S.-based VMware Explore event in August, private cloud continues to be a core focus and strategy for VMware. Expanding the capabilities of its private cloud portfolio involves multiple components spanning several products.

Key products and services announced at the VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona event include:

"The future of the enterprise is private — private cloud, private AI, fueled by your private data," Hock Tan, CEO of Broadcom, said in his VMware Explore keynote address. "It's about staying on-prem, staying in control."

Broadcom CEO Tan Hock in his VMware Explore keynote said, "The future of the enterprise is private — private cloud, private AI, fueled by your private data."

Broadcom CEO Takes Aim at Public Cloud Complexity and Silos

In his keynote address, Tan laid out his vision for the future of enterprise IT.

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It's a future where enterprises get over what he referred to as the public cloud hangover. Tan cited a recent survey that confirms more than eight out of 10 CIOs today are moving workloads back on-premises, a huge change from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. He went on to explain the three C's driving this shift: cost, complexity, and compliance.

"Public cloud is always more expensive than you expect," he said. "Public cloud is another platform and an extra layer to manage, and meeting regulatory requirements today is more complex and costly with public cloud."

On-premises has its own challenges, with Tan highlighting the issue of silos as being a primary concern. He discussed the issue of siloed infrastructure in data centers — that over the period of many years, organizations have created a legacy of best of breed in computing, storage, and networking.

"If you're very siloed in your infrastructure, in my view you're very screwed," Tan said. "Silos won't work well together."

Tan admitted that for a time VMware's products were somewhat siloed. That's no longer the case, he said, as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) addresses siloed infrastructure challenges.

"We have overcome our silos so you can overcome yours," he said.

VMware Debuts VeloRAIN AI Network Traffic Technology

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The new VeloRAIN (Robust AI Networking) architecture addresses the unique challenges of AI workload networking.

VeloRAIN employs machine learning for application identification and dynamic channel estimation for wireless technologies and introduces application-based slicing for optimized AI traffic management. The solution includes AI-powered multi-path optimization for real-time network adjustments.

In a briefing with press and analysts, Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager of Broadcom's Software-Defined Edge division, explained that data from more than half a million deployed edges, functioning as sensors, informed VeloRAIN's development by measuring application behavior and network performance.

The architecture consists of three critical components:

The technology uses machine learning for enhanced application identification, particularly with encrypted traffic. It employs "channel estimation" for wireless technologies to predict bandwidth, jitter, packet loss, and latency variations.

A key innovation is what Uppal calls "application-based slicing," which guarantees quality of experience at the application layer. This becomes particularly important for agentic AI workloads, with multiple AI agents collaborating across distributed networks.

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Tanzu Data Services Brings More Application Power

Tanzu Data Services is a new advanced service from VMware that is integrated with VCF.

"The advanced services are container app services and data services," Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager of Broadcom's Tanzu division, said. "These two services are powered by VMware Tanzu, because app and data code go together, and ultimately we are doing all of this so that we can create business apps to power our business."

The platform includes enterprise-grade support for multiple databases and messaging systems, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and Valkey, with automated capabilities for provisioning, backing up, cloning, patching, scaling, and cluster support.

Tanzu Data Services is part of the larger Tanzu 10 platform update that also benefits from new generative AI capabilities.

Padmanabhan said that with Tanzu Platform 10, developers can easily add genAI-based interfaces to their applications with simple APIs. This enables developers to connect to genAI models, both from private AI foundations as well as public sources, while maintaining governance, token management, security, and data policies.