CarahCast: Podcasts on Technology in the Public Sector

Modernize with Advanced Services

Episode Summary

In this episode, we dive into the advanced services of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and explore how they empower organizations to get the most out of their cloud environments. Adam joins us to break down how solutions like vDefend, Private AI Foundation, Avi Load Balancer, and Live Recovery work seamlessly with VCF to strengthen security, enable GenAI adoption, modernize load balancing, and provide peace of mind against ransomware. We’ll also discuss which features users are adopting most, real-world examples of how they’re elevating IT environments, and why these capabilities are critical for today’s organizations.

Episode Transcription

Anthony Jimenez

Welcome back to Carahcast, the podcast from Carahsoft, the trusted government IT solutions provider. Subscribe to get the latest technology updates in the public sector. I'm Anthony Jimenez, your host from the Carahsoft production team.

 

On behalf of VMware by Broadcom and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused on VMware by Broadcom's advanced services. Adam Dickerson, VMware by Broadcom Senior Solution Architect, and Nick Duff, Carahsoft Pre-Sale Solution Engineer, will discuss highlighting the VCF advanced services, adoption trends, and integration with VCF. Broadcom is actively assisting organizations in navigating licensing transitions and overcoming obstacles.

 

Nick Duff

Everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Nicholas Duff, and today I'm joined by Adam Dickerson to talk about the VMware Cloud Foundation advanced services. To start off, Adam, I'd love to know your point of view on what the VCF advanced services are.

 

Adam Dickerson

Nick, good to be with you guys again. And in partnership, success with Carahsoft, our advanced services are honestly additional capabilities that help customers support extended use cases and drive different areas of innovation for themselves towards the outcomes that they want. It's the sprinkles on top of the scoop of ice cream that VCF is.

 

So, these advanced services are available as add-on licenses and include capabilities such as private AI. Yes, we do AI. Broadcom as a company holistically addresses artificial intelligence, both hardware and software.

 

We'll definitely hopefully get into that a little bit more. But private AI is where customers can securely deploy and scale workloads within their private cloud. We extend to DR and ransomware protection with live recovery and vDefend.

 

There's also advanced load balancing and analytics with Avi Load Balancer. And, of course, our application modernization and data services with the Tanzu portfolio.

 

Nick Duff

That's awesome. So, I guess just diving a little bit deeper, how do these advanced services empower those end users to get more from their cloud foundation platform?

 

Adam Dickerson

I look at cloud as this teenager that's not done yet. If you go through industry definitions, cloud as a service model in this industry really started around 2008. So, we're just coming up on about 17 years.

 

Right. And if you know any 17-year-old, they're not done growing. There are some growing pains that go along with it.

 

Part of that we called a cloud first or cloud to sprint scenario. But now we have the opportunity to think of a holistic and modernized approach to cloud, which is an as a service modeling versus like a destination going to cloud. It's moving in industry and a paradigm and a thought process to the operational construct that is as a service models, multi-tenant models, globalized functions.

 

So, there are some very relevant topics that are also mentioned and addressed during the journey to this as a service destination. So, we approach private cloud with three pillars. Hopefully customers have seen this.

 

But if not, we start with modernize. We move to deliver and then we finish with secure. And one of the hottest pillars in the industry over the last three to five years obviously has been artificial intelligence and generative AI.

 

If someone has not addressed or interacted with a generative AI platform, then I hope they try it at some point in time. There are some absolute positives to what generative AI has done for the industry and also has done for agencies and customers. And we're still discovering use cases that are to their benefit.

 

Our private AI platform performs at the rate of bare metal. And from an enablement standpoint, it enables users to secure and control their data with confidence. The sprint to public cloud sometimes came with a lack of confidence in the security and maintenance of their data.

 

We're talking about federal agencies. A lot of this very protected or in a lot of cases sensitive information comes at a cost. And the cost is confidence.

 

But an agency that's able to hold that data on premise and perform those same functions that they see out with our cloud brethren and sistren is an absolute advantage. So that they can manipulate, utilize that data for mission and civil based outcomes. Additionally, we've talked about the arenas of zero trust.

 

More specifically, if we just look at micro segmentation and aligning to the White House Zero Trust Strategy to harden cybersecurity across federal agencies. What we do with Feed2Fend empowers users to address network security with deeper visibility, some really granular controls, and obviously automation. Each one of those areas are characteristics of modernized cloud, especially on the automation front.

 

Then you also have these policies aren't stagnant. These policies travel with both VMs and containerized workloads. Before we did just virtual machines a la the name VMware, but we're talking about virtual constructs.

 

Enabling capabilities through software defined infrastructure is a very modernized approach. So, we also do the proactive defense of agency information with our Feed2Fend product. Not just setting up walls and gates where we're talking about flexible policies that utilize threat intelligence to give recommendations to say, hey, you might want to think about this.

 

That set of suggestions puts us on a different level than we used to be as an industry. A large positive there. Then we have Avi, which is our advanced load balancing product.

 

And it's really changed the approach to how we scale application and fully supports the as a service model, as well as the multi-tenanted model. So, we can utilize Avi both in on-prem and hybrid environments and the construct functions inside of native cloud as well. So, this allows us to really address hybrid cloud and multi-tenancy across the entire landscape.

 

We do a number of things natively through API instruction. So that's how we empower users. It's the native connectivity.

 

We're not talking about hard lines between products anymore. Or in this case, we are talking about dotted lines and service integration between sets of services.

 

Nick Duff

Awesome. Great. You've mentioned a couple of these advanced services such as Feed2Fend, private AI, even the Avi load balancer.

 

What services specifically are you seeing adopted the most?

 

Adam Dickerson

Honestly, we've got a mix of two. I would say number one is live recovery. Our agencies and customers absolutely work in a nationwide and if not sometimes globalized standpoint.

 

They deal with data centers everywhere. They deal with data all over the place. They deal with data in the field.

 

They deal with data closer to the user and sometimes further away. It's everywhere. Live recovery allows for a few things.

 

One, disaster recovery, which is different than cyber resilience and ransomware recovery. So, our live recovery product traditionally is used to help customers move data from one location to the other in case of an event. Also, they can play out scenarios.

 

If a data center is to go down or virtual machine is to go down to create really, really huge fault tolerance scenarios to ensure that we're getting closer and closer to those five or six nines of availability. After that, it's definitely Feed2Fend. Security is at top of mind of every CISO.

 

That's the nature of their job, as well as security is also everybody's responsibility. When it's embedded to a product, when it's embedded to an infrastructure at the hypervisor level, it's easier to be adopted and it also provides better outcomes because those policies work extremely well with everything inside of the environment. Those are the two I've seen adopted more and more.

 

Things like private AI, they're just newer. So, it hasn't had as much time to be adopted. Also, I was to mention our application modernization capabilities with Tanzu and what it does and Kubernetes, also known as K8s.

 

There are Kubernetes flavors across the landscape with EKS and AKS. But what we do with Tanzu does the same thing of building confidence with command and control for our users and customers in their own environment.

 

Nick Duff

Awesome. So, in these scenarios where our customers are adopting Feed2Fend or live recovery, how are you seeing those advanced services really elevate the user's environment or the user experience?

 

Adam Dickerson

When you develop and deliver a hypervisor native and fully integrated approach, we're talking about advanced threat prevention, not just protection, prevention, as well as the enablement of lateral security. The boundary specific security that was north and south only for a long time left holes to our neighbors left and right. You could not get in the gate, but you did not know if your neighboring VM was sick or affected.

 

When we address the hypervisor, we get security to the kernel layer. In a lot of cases, it does the same thing as I just mentioned before. It emboldens the confidence.

 

Plus, it enables any user or operator to level up and deliver reports to executives so they know that the infrastructures and environments that they're in charge of are protected. Additionally, to that, I mentioned the comprehensive lateral east-west protection. If you're looking from there and moving out, we protect all the way up to layer seven firewalling, which is, I would say over the past three or four years, become an important thing in the industry, not just from us at VMware, but Broadcom, but I can guarantee we've been a leader in protecting that layer of the OSI model.

 

Nick Duff

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. If you liked what you heard and are interested in learning more, please join me, Nicholas Duff, for a live tech demo every Wednesday where I'll be going into more detail on the advanced services from Broadcom's portfolio.

 

Please be on the lookout for more episodes on VMware Cloud Foundation from your Carahsoft team. Thank you.

 

Anthony Jimenez

Thanks for listening, and thank you to our guests, Adam Dickerson and Nick Duff. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to Carahcast, and be sure to listen to our other discussions. If you'd like more information on how VMware by Broadcom can assist your organization, please visit www.Carahsoft.com or email us at vmwarepartnerteam@Carahsoft.com.Thanks again for listening, and have a great day.