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VMware Takes the Digital Foundation To The Edge

by Adam Armstrong

Today at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, VMware Inc. announced that it was taking its Digital Foundation announced yesterday and expanding it to edge computing and IoT solutions. The newly announced features and benefits of VMware’s hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments will be extended to both the edge and IoT devices. VMware is hosting several partners with demos at its IoT booth # 2625.


Today at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, VMware Inc. announced that it was taking its Digital Foundation announced yesterday and expanding it to edge computing and IoT solutions. The newly announced features and benefits of VMware’s hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments will be extended to both the edge and IoT devices. VMware is hosting several partners with demos at its IoT booth # 2625.

Billions of connected devices are making the world of IoT more distributed than ever. These billions of devices mean that secure, managed, and automated edge computing is more important than in the past. VMware intends to take its proven capabilities in the data center and extend them out to the edge to help customers deal with this new challenge. The company has laid out three ways it intends to address the challenges:

  • Control and Simplify Customers’ Edge Strategy: enables customers to extend their hybrid cloud digital foundation to the edge, run their apps anywhere on a variety of platforms
  • Better Secure, Connect, and Manage Customers’ Edge Compute: enables customers to better secure, scale and manage edge compute and IoT end points
  • Accelerate and Scale Customers’ Innovation: enables customers to accelerate and scale, speeding delivery and adoption of edge and IoT applications and solutions

Enabled through VMware NSX SD-WAN, powered by VeloCloud, VMware will be bringing its broad portfolio of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and native cloud technologies to customers’ edge solutions. Part of how they plan on doing this is through the newly announced Project Dimension (a technology that extends VMware Cloud to the data center and edge). Project Dimension combines VMware Cloud Foundation, in a hyperconverged form factor, with a cloud control plane to deliver a Software-Defined Data Center infrastructure as an end-to-end service, operated by VMware. This should simplify operating complexity and thus cost.

Today Dell Technologies will also be announcing new IoT solutions marking both companies as having business focus on accelerating edge and IoT Solution collectivity. Part of Dell’s announcement is the integration of VMware Pulse IoT Center 2.0. This IoT infrastructure management solution offers updated capabilities designed to provide customers with broader management, more intelligent operations, faster innovation and better protection. VMware Pulse IoT Center can be consumed as either an on-premises or SaaS solution. Additional features include:

  • Low-touch, more secure enrollment: Low-touch enrollment and configuration capabilities
  • Deeper edge system management: Ability to perform Gateway configuration through the action framework (sshd, turn on/off port, IP address table, etc.) as well as provide complete firmware and BIOS updates for selected gateways
  • Enhanced alerts and notifications: New and improved alert system on individual managed object or group of managed objects notifications on alerts can now be received via email and SMS integration, or API into a third-party system
  • Enhanced over-the-air (OTA) updates: Customers can have more granular control over OTA scheduling, activation, progress status, package type and failure handling

VMware Pulse IoT Center

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