Broadcom Inc. today will use its Explore conference in Barcelona to announce a range of updates to its VMware Cloud Foundation platform, introducing new services and partnerships to support generative artificial intelligence development, cybersecurity and sovereign clouds.

Enhancements to vSphere Foundation, a version of VMware’s vSphere software primarily aimed at small to medium-sized virtualized environments, more than double storage capacity to make it an “enterprise-class hyperconverged infrastructure platform,” said Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of marketing for cloud platform, infrastructure and solutions at Broadcom.

The announcements continue VMware’s strategy of providing “a wide variety of offerings for customers of various sizes and stages in the cloud journey,” Shenoy said. “If they want a fully private cloud platform, they can go with VMware Cloud Foundation. If they want an enterprise-class hyperconverged infrastructure platform, they can go with vSphere Foundation, or if they just want to start with compute virtualization, they can go with vSphere enterprise.”

Simpler access to data services

A new offering in the VCF library of Advanced Services — which are private cloud services similar to those offered in the public cloud — simplifies the deployment and management of four popular data services, with an emphasis on data security and operational efficiency.

Tanzu Data Services integrates fleet-level automated lifecycle management integrated natively into VCF with support for the PostgreSQL and MySQL database management systems, RabbitMQ messaging and Valkey, a high-performance, open-source key-value fork of Redis.

Tanzu Data Services automates deployment, backups, clustering and security patching with a self-service delivery model and access to Broadcom enterprise-level support.

An expanded VMware Live Recovery service now supports Google Cloud VMware Engine as a target isolated recovery environment for VCF workloads. VMware said that this creates a secure recovery target alongside VMware Cloud on AWS and on-premises environments, allowing for more flexible and faster recovery. Previously, VMware Live Recovery protected GCVE sites only as sources.

An update to VMware’s cybersecurity portfolio, VMware vDefend, adds a generative AI assistant that helps information technology security teams identify more sophisticated threats, reduce false positives and enhance overall situational awareness. Intelligent Assist uses a natural language interface to describe complex security incidents and provides remediation recommendations.

Further enhancements to the vDefend portfolio improve east-west traffic security within data centers and private cloud environments. Custom signature support for intrusion detection and prevention systems allows organizations to tailor defenses by importing custom or third-party signatures. A new “Malware Analysis Test Drive” capability lets security teams analyze potentially harmful files or URLs for sophisticated or evasive malware.

Azure AI Video Indexer comes to private clouds

Broadcom is also expanding support for generative AI in private cloud environments with a new integration with Microsoft Corp.’s Azure AI Video Indexer on VCF and Azure VMware Solution. Azure AI Video Indexer works with Azure Arc — a Microsoft service designed to extend Azure’s cloud management and services to on-premises, multicloud and edge environments — for video and audio analysis.

Broadcom has integrated it into VMware Private AI, enabling generative AI workloads to run in data center and edge environments. That means enterprises can leverage Azure’s AI and machine learning tools to perform media analysis on private infrastructure while meeting data residency and security requirements.

“Customers can now keep their proprietary data on-premises and use Azure services on top of VCF to extract meaningful data and insights from their video data and their audio data to improve content discoverability,” Shenoy said.

Enhancements to Broadcom’s Private Cloud Modernization Program are aimed at helping organizations modernize their private cloud environments. A new certification track, VMware Certified Professional – VCF Architect, validates an architect’s expertise in building VCF-based applications with acceptable levels of availability, manageability, performance, recoverability and security.

“We have completely revamped our VCF certification program so architects become the implementers of a modern cloud platform rather than just doing it at a component level,” Shenoy said. Professionals who receive VCP certification will now get up to three years of a free personal-use license for VCF. “We are committed to helping our customers not only learn about VCF but also getting hands-on experience,” Shenoy said.

Smarter network monitoring

In a parallel announcement, Broadcom unveiled several updates to its VeloCloud portfolio, introducing VeloRAIN (Robust AI Networking) and two new high-end edge appliances, the VeloCloud Edge 4100 and 5100.

The VeloRain architecture leverages AI to improve network performance and security with the ability to identify and prioritize encrypted application traffic for better service quality. VeloRain can identify previously opaque traffic types, allowing organizations to streamline application performance and prioritize applications without manual intervention. AI-driven channel estimation for wireless networks supports more efficient traffic management across variable network conditions.

The enhancements aim to do a better job of identifying the type of traffic traversing networks, a task that has become more challenging as AI training and inferencing has introduced new variables.

“AI applications are different in the way they use the network,” said Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager of the software-defined edge division at Broadcom. “They’re very bursty, highly latency-sensitive and peer-to-peer. You get high asymmetry in the traffic for generative AI workloads compared to workloads we’ve been used to.”

VeloRain has been trained on data from more than a half-million edge devices to create service-level profiles tuned to use cases in vertical industries like retail, manufacturing, and financial services. The goal “is to be able to use AI to improve the performance of the underlying networks and the quality of experience for the users of those network,” Uppal said.

The new VeloCloud Edge 4100 and 5100 appliances provide up to 100-gigabits-per-second throughput along with clustering for greater scalability. They’re designed to provide enhanced resilience and rapid failover capabilities.

Broadcom also said it has more than doubled its roster of service provider partners who provide sovereign cloud services, to more than 50. A sovereign cloud is a cloud computing environment designed to meet specific national or regional regulatory, legal and security requirements.

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