VMware Inc. positions its platform for managing virtual machines and container orchestration — VMware Cloud Foundation — as “the simplest path to the hybrid cloud.” This has not gone unnoticed by one of its major partners and that firm’s own customer base.

“VMware Cloud Foundation has really caught the attention of our mid- to enterprise-sized customers,” said Vaughn Stewart (pictured), vice president of technology alliance partners at Pure Storage Inc. “The focus is on simplifying lifecycle management, giving you greater means to connect to the public cloud. They are bringing their strength in providing simplicity and end-to-end hardware to application management and to disaggregated architectures where the focus of that capability has been with hyperconverged infrastructure over the past five to six years.”

Stewart spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during VMworld. They discussed recent enhancements for VMware Cloud Foundation that improve performance and data management on storage platforms. (* Disclosure below.)

Support for mission-critical apps

VMware has made several recent updates in its portfolio that should appeal to the enterprise storage community. One was the addition of non-volatile memory express over fabrics support to speed storage access on vSphere 7.

“This is key because NVMe over fabrics allows the IO path to move away from a small computer system interface-based form of communication to memory-based communication,” Stewart explained. “This unleashes a new level of performance, a better way to support those business and mission-critical applications, and a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor and footprint within your datacenter.”

Another area of VMware technology that has evolved over recent months to the benefit of storage providers involved virtual volumes, or vVols, which allow a virtual machine to communicate data management requirements directly to a storage array. In mid-September, VMware announced new vVols integration into VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 with a common management framework for external storage.

“VVols has been promoted within VMware Cloud Foundation to be principal storage,” Stewart said. “From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage-centric in their day-to-day jobs. Pure is a VMware design partner around vVols. We are one of the most adopted storage platforms, and we are really leaning in on VMware Cloud Foundation.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE