Alibaba Cloud will now offer VMware’s hybrid cloud software stack on its cloud infrastructure. The partnership comes out of Alibaba’s conference in Hangzhou, China this week.
This partnership makes Alibaba Cloud VMware’s first Cloud Verified Partner — which signifies compatibility between cloud providers and VMware cloud infrastructure services — in China. VMware’s hybrid cloud capabilities will be initially available to customers in China and Asia. According to Ajay Patel, VMware SVP and GM of its cloud provider software unit, these partners help “fuel business growth by driving innovation, improving efficiency and lowering costs for customers as they transform application portfolios for a multi-cloud, multi-device world.”
Leveraging VMware’s hybrid cloud software, customers will be able to scale their workloads from on-premises data centers to Alibaba Cloud.
VMware will provide its software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies. This includes its virtualization platform vSphere, vCenter management software, vSAN storage, its NSX networking platform, and SDDC automation.
AliCloud has named a number of partnerships this year to continue to grow its services and to expand offerings outside of China.
Earlier this year, the Chinese company partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). HPE will offer Alibaba Cloud’s hybrid cloud stack — its Apsara software — on its infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region. This will see Apsara certified on HPE platforms including ProLiant Gen10 servers and FlexFabric networking switches. Alibaba Cloud customers will also gain access to HPE services such as it artificial intelligence (AI) and elastic GPU computing.
In addition, coming from this conference, Alibaba Cloud and Intel launched a hybrid cloud partnership and an edge computing platform. The two companies started the Apsara Stack Industry Alliance to promote Alibaba’s hybrid cloud stack. HPE isn’t a member, at least not yet. The edge platform is an open architecture for IoT applications.
