Blog
21 April, 2024
A multi-cloud approach should be taken into consideration and evaluated by enterprises for several technical and business-related reasons, including:
- Backup and/or DR services (better protection of data across clouds)
- Service tiering
- Workload migration
- Copy
- Archiving
- Cloud Independence (avoid dependency on a single public cloud provider / more than one vendor support)
- Price advantages
With advances in technology and companies’ operational processes, a multi-cloud approach should bring on-premise and cloud environments to one true, continuous environment of storage, compute and other resources.
Based on survey results by ‘451 research’ (Hosting and Cloud Study; The Digital Revolution, Powered by Cloud) it is clear that such an approach is seriously taken into consideration – more than one third of organizations want to work with 4 or more cloud vendors.
With OVH Acquisition of VMware’s vCloud Air in 2017, the three largest tech companies — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — are now competing, and many cloud providers of all sizes are coming up to take part in this competition. Due to this acquisition of Public Cloud service (vCloud Air) by OVH, VMware can focus now on integration of their vCloud stack within Microsoft (Azure) and Google (GCP) cloud’s platform and further enhancement of vCloud stack within Amazon (AWS) platform. Thus, if integration efforts with Azure and GCP will be successful, VMware will be in the position to be the broker of cloud services and a single management point that allows end users to decide which public cloud is best for their workloads.
VMware already has a successful strategic partnership with AWS. With VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS, customers get the best functionalities/services by moving to Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) – compute, storage, and network virtualization stack deployed on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal, and highly available AWS infrastructure. One can also easily have a global footprint by deploying multiple VMC SDDCs in different regions. At present, two AWS regions are available — US West (Oregon) and US East (N. Virginia) — with more regions planned for the near future. By deploying SDDCs in different regions, one can have a global SDDC infrastructure with all the required vSphere, vSAN, and NSX functionalities.
To deploy application within a multi-cloud environment, it’s important to consider the following factors:
- Cloud data appliances’ support of multiple clouds (most of cloud data protection appliances now support connectivity to cloud storage providers with many of them giving up proprietary cloud services providers in favor of public cloud storage providers …but it is still good to verify availability of such support)
- Strong controls on the data management and user management across clouds
- Governance and assurance capability to the data to ensure secure encryption, access control and meta-data services across multi-cloud environments
- Standard protocol(s) to access unstructured data from application (e.g., use S3 protocol without being locked to the AWS environment)
Vendors/technologies of interest for multi-cloud environment:
Minio
An open source object storage server with Amazon S3 compatible API. Build cloud-native applications portable across all major public and private clouds
CloudVelox
Multi-cloud Automation and Orchestration software
CloudEndure
Disaster recovery and live migration to AWS, GCP and Azure
Komprise
Transparently moves, copies, and manages data based on your objectives to targets of your choice – on premise or cloud
Hedvig
Software-defined storage provides an always-on data fabric for VMs, containers, and backups. The patented architecture stores, protects, and replicates data across multiple private and public clouds
Cloudian
Cloudian HyperCloud for public cloud storage, enabling true bi-modal data storage across multiple cloud environments. Fully supported, enterprise-ready solution to access customer’s choice of cloud platforms from their S3-compliant applications