Explosive growth in AI, Martin Hosken (VMware) talks about it

They discuss topics such as Sovereign Cloud and Private AI, to name a few. What exactly is a Sovereign Cloud? How does VMware differentiate itself in this area? And what is VMware doing in the field of AI? Larik-Jan and Martin discuss it in the video below.

Martin, what are the topics you are seeing most often at the moment?

Martin: ‘We see that it's a lot about Sovereign Cloud and how this is affecting the market. VMware is more or less the leader around this whole topic and even Azure, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Oracle and AWS are all trying to catch up now. But there are also challenges in this area, for instance regarding the definition of Sovereign Cloud. There is no clear definition. As a result, we see that partners, as well as competitors, are all using it differently.’

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What is the difference between VMware and these other parties in terms of sovereign Cloud?

Martin: ‘At VMware, it's not just about data residency, but rather control. VMware is the only Cloud partner that helps customers and partners gain jurisdictional control over their data. In fact, VMware does not own and manage its own Clouds. Our partners own and manage Clouds in a jurisdictional manner and therefore have full jurisdictional control over their data, including that of their customers. This is unique when you look at it from the Sovereign Cloud perspective. We live in a time of hypes and that is currently around Sovereign Cloud, everyone wants to ride on this. You can't afford to be left behind, otherwise you become irrelevant. ‘The European Commission largely aligns itself with how we think about what Sovereign Cloud is. But it would be helpful if they made a statement like, ‘this is how we see Sovereign Cloud’. That would also benefit us enormously. They have been talking about it for some time, though, so maybe it will come.’

What is VMware doing in the field of AI?

Martin: ‘In Las Vegas, we announced our “Private AI Initiative”. This is about being able to perform the iteration of one's dataset locally where the data resides. We have many companies and customers who collect data in their own data centres and then move this data to Public Clouds to do analytics. AI-based analytics, machine learning etcetera. Doing so is not a convenient thing to do, both from a security and privacy viewpoint, and from a time and cost perspective. The ability to perform, say, AI analytics and machine learning on prem or Edge is much more attractive. Thousands of VMware customers already perform these AI predictions, so running this kind of analysis on VMware is not new. However, AI is really exploding in recent months and this type of AI is very data-intensive. Hence, VMware is building Private AI which is basically VMware Cloud with a stack of different components you need, both open source as well as Nvidia proprietary drivers (or other GPU vendors). In fact, there is not just one architecture, but by giving customers a standard approach and a reference architecture, developers have a starting point.’

What are the challenges faced here?

Martin: ‘Getting the hardware/GPUs is a real challenge. So right now we are building it for customers who are already working on this. They already have the hardware and skills, but were just missing a standardised approach to get started with it.’

Which developments do you see at the moment?

Martin: ‘We see a growth in the number of workloads that have moved to the public Cloud in recent years, which have been brought back. In some cases on prem but also private infrastructure on colocation. At VMware, we have the right tooling that helps customers migrate back to VMware, but we are also building additional functionality to further simplify this process. We also call this Cloud Smart: adding intelligence into what decisions you make. I've said this before, but sometimes it's just okay to change your mind and go in a different direction. If you decide to put something back because it doesn't work well, for example, you shouldn't see this as failure. Instead, you should see it as a learning process. ‘Having said that, migrating between Clouds is not really easy right now. We calculated that putting an application in the public Cloud costs around $600/800 and if you want to get your application out of there again it will cost around $3,600. This is because when you migrate to the public Cloud, it is more of an infrastructure play, you migrate from one infrastructure to another. But when you want to get out of the public Cloud, you actually have to think about the application layout. In some cases, it is even faster to rebuild something, than to migrate something.’