As VMware Inc. continues to embrace cloud and the digital transformation, it relies on a lot of big partnerships, including its decade-long alliance with IBM. So how is the partnership with VMware and IBM going these days, especially when it pertains to data storage and security?

“We do have a very long relationship and history with VMware,” said Sam Werner (pictured), vice president and offering manager of storage at IBM. “And the thing I love about the VMware community is … people in the VM world really understand the importance of storage and having a strategy around storage for how it’s deployed, simplifying the management, automating things and … most importantly, bringing some of the security aspects — especially in today’s world.”

Werner spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during VMworld. They discussed IBM Cloud and VMware’s partnership around storage, as well as topics like Kubernetes. (* Disclosure below.)

VMware and IBM’s integrations with storage and security

Because of the importance of storage and security around storage, VMware has very strong integration with IBM’s FlashSystem family, making it easy to deploy and ensure that companies have end-to-end data protection, encryption and everything it needs to secure mission-critical applications in a VMware environment, according to Werner.

“IBM is a leader in data protection software, and we’ve made large investments in our integration with VMware to ensure our customers are able to secure their data and ensure that they have backups that they can easily restore,” Werner said. “And we’ve tried to make it simple enough that the VM administrator can actually do it on their own.”

If companies want to backup their VMware environment on Amazon Web Services, they can use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, on-prem or in IBM Cloud. One of the benefits of Spectrum Protect Plus is that it allows companies to take snapshots of their data, allowing instantaneous recovery and leveraging this ability in on-prem environments and different cloud environments, according to Werner.

“It allows you to offload for longer-term backups and archives or disaster recovery, but it also allows you to do things like data migration, open up new analytics, make data available for analytics and other environments,” Werner said. “So I think that connection — both leveraging the underlying VMware capabilities, but having a very strong application running on top that can help you with the orchestration — gives you the ability to really take advantage of a hybrid multicloud environment.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE