The Enterprise IT segment continues its evolution to a hybrid cloud strategy, enjoying the benefits that both public and private infrastructure bring to the table. Almost every IT leader I meet is integrating public cloud services and private resources to meet the diverse needs of their organizations while balancing cost, performance, regulatory, and security considerations.

IT teams increasingly base their hybrid clouds on a uniform operating environment between their public services (IaaS, PaaS), and their privately-operated data centers. A common framework allows them to manage both environments using a single toolkit, reduce application testing and validation costs, and increase workload portability. This strategy also consolidates the required staff training and skill requirements.

Today at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations Management & Data Center conference, Intel, and VMware announced their intent to create an Intel® Select Solution for VMware Cloud Foundation version 2.3, with the goal of accelerating customers’ transition to a seamless hybrid cloud using a uniform VMware environment. This Select Solution is expected to be offered by leading data center OEMs in the first half of 2018 and joins the Select Solution catalog alongside VMware vSAN. As of today, Inspur, Quanta, Sugon, and Supermicro have indicated their intent to offer this solution.

VMware Cloud Foundation – Manage Workloads in Private and Public Clouds

VMware Cloud Foundation is VMware’s integrated hybrid cloud platform. It delivers simple, secure, agile cloud infrastructure via software-defined compute, storage, and networking, along with cloud management services to deploy workloads across public and private environments.

Cloud Foundation offers VMware’s latest technology to run both virtual machines and containers, the preferred development technology for cloud-native microservices. Under a single administrative toolset, Cloud Foundation enables enterprises to place and manage workloads in both their private infrastructure and a variety of public cloud service providers.

Intel Select Solution Simplifies & Accelerates Hybrid Cloud Deployment

When delivered as an Intel Select Solution, server manufacturers and solution integrators can offer Cloud Foundation in a complete configuration verified by Intel to meet-or-exceed required performance and capability specifications. The verified hardware/software combination can assure buyers they will get a robust, high-performance solution for their hybrid cloud, reduce their testing and validation burden, and accelerate their time-to-deployment.

Intel Select Solutions for VMware Cloud Foundation are designed to help IT organizations realize the promise of hybrid cloud technology faster than integrating and validating their own configuration from scratch. Intel Select Solutions for VMware Cloud Foundation include Intel’s latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Optane™ SSDs, Intel® 10Gb Ethernet and a range of hardware-enhanced security and performance features.

I’m a passionate advocate for IT transformation to the hybrid cloud. I look forward to the availability of Intel Select Solutions for VMware Cloud Foundation in the first half of 2018, and excited to see more solutions that help our customers “go hybrid” faster.

Learn more today about Intel Select Solutions, Intel Select Solution for VMware vSAN, and VMware Cloud Foundation.