Broadcom on Tuesday released VMware Tanzu Data Services, a new “advanced service” for VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), at VMware Explore Barcelona.
According to a release, the new offerings will be delivered through the private cloud, and provide the following built-in data management services:
- VMware Tanzu for Postgres: “A high performance, relational, transactional database platform that also includes PGvector for GenAI use cases.”
- VMware Tanzu for MySQL: “The classic web application backend that optimizes transactional data handling for cloud native environments.”
- VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ: “Secure, real-time message queuing, routing, and streaming for distributed systems, supporting microservices and event-driven architectures.”
- VMware Tanzu for Valkey: “Low-latency caching for high-demand applications, reducing strain on primary databases and ensuring fast data access.”
“Supporting the proliferation of manually deployed data services on premises has introduced delays and risks to the enterprise,” the Broadcom release said.
These problems include the time it takes to provision new data services, such as in high availability and disaster recovery, where, Broadcom said, “it can take an enterprise a year or more to properly set up and tune a deployment architectures that includes high availability, disaster recovery and backups.” It also noted that there are issues keeping up with operating system and database patches on individual persistent database servers.
During a media and analyst pre-briefing held last week, Purnima Padmanabhan, GM of Broadcom’s Tanzu Division, said that when she talks to customers, “they ask me, from a developer perspective and from an app perspective, only one thing: ‘How can I get speed and velocity?’ The difference between low performers and high performers in the industry is huge. For low performers, it may take as much as six months to get the code, once they have written the code and business logic, into production, while for high performers, it might be only one to seven days. The entire goal of Tanzu is to help customers move up this velocity arc.”
The platform, she said, “allows customers to develop, operate, and optimize their applications at scale and make sure that this is at scale across all environments, both private cloud and public clouds.”
For admins who are responsible for delivering data services on private cloud, the release said that benefits of the new services include simplified lifecycle management, enhanced security and compliance, experts on-call, and built-in configurations for “high availability, multi data center replication and backup.”
Asked for his reaction to the launch, John Annand, practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “there is a fun contrast in VMware by Broadcom these days. On the one hand, you have an amazingly ambitious call to action from [Broadcom CEO] Hock Tan, not just for enterprise adoption of private cloud, but also private AI — complex and complicated technologies with a plethora of nerd knobs for the enterprise to configure (or misconfigure). But VMware promises to make that easy and accessible for the average enterprise IT admin.”
Now, he said, “they announce Tanzu Data Services — is it going to be a similarly wide reaching and infinitely customizable and tweakable offering? No — two database types, a message queue, and a caching engine. Is it comprehensive? Certainly not. Is it enough to play in their target market? I would have to say yes.”
According to Annand, “VMware by Broadcom is not looking to capture the advanced data sciences market with this offering, just like Tanzu is not the software development platform for bleeding edge dev shops. Their sweet spot is enterprise business leaders with a desire for control who are in tension with hipster dev teams who want to move fast and break things. PostgreSQL and MySQL are perfectly fine relational databases (though you would wonder why not MariaDB), RabbitMQ is great, and Valkey is fine.”
All in all, he said, it is a “complete set of tools (though not perhaps the ones every individual admin/engineer would have picked) for an MVP [minimum viable product] data service. Add that to the SDLC [software development lifecycle] and workload placement services of Tanzu, along with the GPU and model management from VMWare Private AI, and risk adverse management can now check the box they have given the dev teams [the tools that] will accomplish the job.”
Annand added, “there is an old adage that the hallmark of a good compromise is that you have satisfied no one. Tanzu Data Services should do at least a little better than that low bar. Does it compete toe to toe with the myriad of options available in public cloud data service platforms? Not at all.”
But there is, he said, “real value in what they offer (end to manual patching, architectural confusions, backups, availability, open source BOM [bill of materials] vulnerabilities, and more); the only question that remains is how much Hock Tan will be charging the enterprise customer to unlock that value.”
Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said the “idea here (at the launch) is that infrastructure vendors need to certify their stack for the apps (including databases) that live higher up in the stack. VMware would prioritize these apps based on client interest and demand. Tanzu is not a service, it is a product, and the major competitors are Red Hat, Microsoft Azure, GCP [Google Cloud Platform], AWS [Amazon Web Services] and Suse.”
Check out more VMware Explore news on our microsite.
Source:: Network World