As data centres rain down on South Africa, bringing numerous cloud computing providers to the region, businesses are facing the challenge of managing the new “multi-cloud” environment, while the providers wrestle with uncertain power supply in a power-hungry sector.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, NTT, Africa Data Centres and Huawei have all built major data centres, known as hyperscalers, in South Africa, while South Africa-based BCX and Teraco have dramatically increased capacity, as demand for cloud services grows relentlessly. This has led to the adoption of multi-cloud strategies as businesses seek to ensure they are protected from both power and cloud outages.
Rangarajan Raghuram, CEO of VMware, the world’s leading provider of cloud management systems, told Business Times that the cloud was a victim of its own success, and too much choice was leading to “cloud chaos”.
“Because of the initial successes of the cloud and the fact that business is driving for ever faster (digital) transformation, we’ve got a lot of fragmentation. Most companies thought that they would take all of their application portfolio to the cloud, and rewrite everything to be modern, cloud-native applications. There are simply not enough developers in the world to do that.”
Raghuram was speaking on the sidelines of the annual VMware Explore conference in Barcelona last week, where the company unveiled a range of products and services to simplify cloud management and reduce its energy demands.
Most companies thought that they would take all of their application portfolio to the cloud, and rewrite everything to be modern, cloud-native applications. There are simply not enough developers in the world to do that
— Rangarajan Raghuram, CEO of VMware
He was made CEO of VMware last year, after his predecessor Pat Gelsinger was appointed CEO of IT giant Intel. Since then, Raghuram has presided over the $61bn sale of VMware to Broadcom, a major player in the semiconductor and data centre space.
VMware was the first company to commercialise the idea of virtualised computers, a concept originally invented by IBM that would allow for “time-sharing” on computers. Such virtual machines, or VMs, provide the foundation for cloud computing.
In an exclusive interview, Raghuram said that as they move to the cloud many companies face the challenge of malfunctioning enterprise applications, which also happen to be critical to their businesses.
“If it stops working, the business stops working. When you’ve got each group doing their own thing, you have numerous different approaches to security, distributing applications, or managing applications. That’s why we did partnerships with all the hyperscalers to get the VMware Cloud and run it in their clouds.
“Now they can run all of their enterprise applications in a consistent way. That’s why you can go from ‘cloud chaos’ to ‘cloud smart’, which is a faster application development velocity, consistent enterprise infrastructure management and frictionless experience.”
During his keynote address, Raghuram introduced energy efficiency as one of the key pillars on which the company was building its strategy.
“One of the benefits of virtualisation is that it makes resource usage more efficient, and that leads to better energy usage,” he told Business Times. “Now, especially over the past year or so, two things have come into play.
“First, there has been a movement of investors towards identifying companies’ ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) practices. Many of our customers come to us and said: ‘Hey, we are required to report on our ESG practices on the board. How can you help us?’ ... We’ve created new technologies to monitor and provide dashboards for measuring energy consumption, and directly capture carbon consumption.”
Most significantly, data migration technology allows companies to move applications to more energy-efficient data centres. This, in turn, provides for a dynamic approach to South Africa’s energy crisis, he said.
“Load-shedding typically is in a particular part of the city or part of the country. Then that rolls out across many parts of the country at different times of different days. Our software now allows power demand to be managed in the data centre. We can dynamically download the load-shedding schedule into our management product, and have the management product automatically place a workload on its minimum consumption.”
Human intervention is built into the product, when needed for unanticipated scenarios. However, for the most part, energy management is automated, especially when limited power capacity is available.
“What happens in enterprise computing is, especially when there are many developers, people will leave their machines running. And the same thing happens with virtual machines. We have software that can automatically shut them down. We have software that automatically looks at your consumption history over the past many months and makes recommendations. For example, it will say this machine is barely being used; you can shut it down for this period of time. We’ve got all of those capabilities to help address South Africa’s challenges.”
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