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CenturyLink Launches Private Cloud for VMware Cloud on AWS
CenturyLink, a VMware premier cloud provider partner, on Thursday launched the CenturyLink Private Cloud for Vmware Cloud on AWS, a fully managed service, and also announced five major enhancements to its CenturyLink Private Cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). The news comes ahead of next week’s VMWorld in San Francisco.
The new service delivers an integrated hybrid cloud solution. The platform can extend on-premises vSphere environments to a VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure.
CenturyLink’s David Shacochis
“As an innovator in the software-defined data center, this is another milestone on our journey to hybrid cloud solutions, enabling users to tap into private cloud resources anywhere our global network can reach,” said David Shacochis, vice president of product management for IT solutions at CenturyLink. “These advances are fueled by CenturyLink’s decades of expertise and mature relationships with both VMware and AWS.”
The enhancements to CenturyLink Private Cloud on VCF help to link public cloud efficiencies to private cloud and edge-connected computing solutions. CenturyLink recently unveiled a new edge-focused strategy.
The five enhancements include:
- Expansion to additional third-partner data centers, globally, enabling deployment to more than 2,200 network-connected private and public data centers as well as more than 100 edge computing locations.
- Support for VMware Enterprise PKS for enterprise-grade monitoring and management of container solutions for production workloads.
- Support for VMware HCX migration and hybridity tool.
- Support for Caveonix RiskForesight, which addresses the need for continuous compliance and cybersecurity through real-time visibility into workloads, proactive risk management, compliance monitoring and policy enforcement.
- Support for 2nd generation Intel Xeon scalable CPU, which offers better performance and efficiency and new integration features such as Intel Deep Learning Boost for AI inference acceleration, as well as the latest Intel Optane solid state drives.
CenturyLink’s Paul Savill
“These latest upgrades are great examples of CenturyLink’s innovation to give our customers more ways to tap into the power of the software-defined data center and our robust global network,” said Paul Savill, senior vice president, product management at CenturyLink. “For workloads that don’t fit cleanly into a public cloud environment, or workloads that require greater proximity to the network edge, our private cloud portfolio enables the enterprise to address these use cases with agility and efficiency.”
As a former Cloud Sales Engineer for Centurylink, I would hardly call them innovators. More like very late to the game after multiple cloud failures. For years they were behind the game by offering VMware based cloud environments with little to no management features, and by placing clients in their own vShere islands instead of utilizing a cohesive management platform like vCloud Director (which smaller more nimble companies have been doing for a decade).
Now they claim to be innovators by just reselling AWS with their front end?
Unless they can leverage their relationship with AWS to provide CTL clients deep cuts in cost, I don’t see why anyone would go through them only to add another level of administrative complexity, and loosing transparency. It certainly isn’t the customer service… as I’ve seen several clients bail due to lack of customer service and reliability.
As a long time veteran of designing global cloud environments for billion dollar financial companies… I’d suggest anyone to just go direct with AWS or Azure, or if looking for private cloud make sure they use a “real” management platform, not some kludged together portal that looks like it’s from 1980.