Optus has teamed up with VMware to offer the latter’s software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology to Australian enterprises as it expands its 5G network footprint across the country.

The telco said enterprises can make use of VMware’s SD-WAN technology, which works across fixed and wireless networks, to tap 5G as their primary connection to speed up IT deployment with lower latency.

Deon Liebenberg, vice-president of product innovation at Optus Enterprise, said the partnership with VMware was part of a broader strategy to provide enterprises with a greater choice of digital networking solutions.

In particular, he singled out VMware’s dynamic multipath optimisation, an SD-WAN feature that lets enterprises measure live network conditions and maximise network performance.

“The service will also enhance user experiences across common business tools, such as Microsoft 365 and Amazon Web Services-delivered cloud services. By combining Optus’s 4G and 5G networks with VMware SD-WAN, we look forward to enabling transformative cloud access and mobile experience, particularly for branch and home users,” said Liebenberg.

Ron Longo, VMware’s vice-president for worldwide service provider sales, added that the relationship with Optus would help to “reduce network complexity and give IT teams more time to focus on other business challenges and drive innovation and strategic outcomes across their business”.

SD-WAN has taken off faster in Australia than other markets, partly due to the migration of last-mile access to the country’s national broadband network.

According to technology research firm GlobalData, nearly 60% of enterprises with more than 200 employees have already deployed SD-WAN and one in three are considering implementing it in the next 12 months.

“While cost-saving has been part of the motivation to adopt SD-WAN, better security and network management is also a key benefit,” said Siow Meng Soh, senior technology analyst at GlobalData.

Australia’s SD-WAN market is highly fragmented, however. GlobalData’s research shows that Cisco and VMware are ahead of the pack, but Aryaka, Silver Peak and Fortinet are also popular, with each having over 10% of market share in Australia.

Soh said SD-WAN vendors were trying to gain market share by working with different channel partners, including systems integrators, resellers and local providers such as telcos.

According to GlobalData, nearly 10% of enterprises were interested in buying SD-WAN directly from vendors and nearly 20% indicated telcos as their preferred option.

As more businesses move to the cloud, SD-WAN will play an increasingly important role in providing users with access to applications and data.

“SD-WAN has a bigger role to play as businesses look to simplify branch networking, increase the use of cloud-based services and adopt remote working,” said Soh. “As a result, companies need to also have a long-term network strategy instead of treating SD-WAN as a standalone solution which delivers quick fixes.”

Microsoft on Thursday announced the general availability of its Azure Hybrid Benefit solution for Linux customers in India.

Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that helps organisations to cut the costs of running workloads in the cloud, Microsoft said.

It helps customers “seamlessly” migrate to on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) virtual machines (VMs) to Microsoft Azure.

The solution enables significant reduction in cost of running workloads on-the-cloud by converting existing PAYG (pay-as-you-go) virtual machines (VMs) to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, Microsoft said.

The solution gains significance in view of the fact that businesses face challenges in migrating workload to public cloud due to regulatory and data sovereignty related issues.

This is common in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and government.

Also, some workloads, especially those related to edge, require low latency.

Additionally, many organisations have significant on-premises investments that they want to maximise so they choose to modernise on-location datacenters and traditional apps.

This includes in on-premises licenses and subscriptions, and the inability to migrate them to cloud often affects the return on investment and total cost of ownership.

Azure solves this by acknowledging this investment and not charging for subscriptions or licenses again when customers move to the cloud, Microsoft said.

Globally, over 1,500 Linux virtual machines were migrated during the preview period to Azure using the new Azure Hybrid Benefit capabilities, enabling significant cost reduction for enterprise running Linux workloads in Azure, the company added.

The managed service provider (MSP) market is extremely competitive and fraught with challenges. MSPs need to offer competitive pricing to make their offerings attractive to customers, but at the same time require the agility to develop and deliver solutions that support the customer journey into the cloud. MSPs also need to meet and exceed service level agreements (SLAs) to maintain their customer base. They also need to avoid vendor lock-in, which may isolate potential customers, simplify their solution stack to streamline management and operations, and ensure their technology is always up to date. Achieving all of this can be impossible without the right foundation in place, which is where software-defined storage (SDS) comes in.

Standardising hardware is the key

SDS is the ideal supporting platform to help MSPs build and deliver solutions and easily manage and operate them. By decoupling hardware and software, SDS allows MSPs to take advantage of their choice of server technology and server architecture. This ensures a vendor-agnostic approach, while at the same time enabling MSPs to standardise on their hardware, using commodity servers, cloud architecture or a combination of the two.

By unifying block, object and file for hypervisors, containers, backup and cloud workloads, the result is a scale-out, resilient and distributed architecture that maximises availability and protects against hardware failure. Essentially, SDS brings significant simplicity into the framework for enhanced predictability in an elastic solution that can scale to thousands of nodes as demand increases, without disrupting service.

The ultimate goal is to establish a fabric that can support a variety of workloads, including virtualisation, containers and backup, and meet today’s data infrastructure challenges through a single domain.

Ideal for MSPs

The backbone of SDS is highly supportive of a multi-tenancy environment and simplifies management of the technology stack that goes with it, regardless of the storage or workloads that are being run. SDS also supports all providers, ensuring there is no vendor lock-in, giving ultimate flexibility in the choice of hardware, development and deployment options.

A single management and presentation layer not only simplifies complexity, it also collapses storage silos into a single management interface to eliminate mass data fragmentation. By deploying a software-defined layer on top of commoditised hardware, across various clusters including virtualised, bare metal, containers and the cloud, a truly agile infrastructure can be created. This also mitigates the risk of technology refreshes, which can be absorbed without creating disruption or downtime.

Virtual disks deliver a utility storage framework on the back end, for granular provisioning of volumes with enterprise storage functionality. This elastic infrastructure eliminates downtime across the spectrum. It also further delivers on agility by automating management of the underlying hardware and infrastructure, removing this from day-to-day administrative tasks.

Focus on customers, not tin

Using SDS, MSPs can solve new infrastructure challenges in a distributed way, enabling seamless cloud integration and adoption, supporting the hybrid cloud journey and allowing for enterprise data protection through data distribution.

SDS provides storage for virtual environments, seamlessly integrates with various container orchestrators, and serves as a single backup storage target, regardless of which backup software solution is in use. This improves efficiency, allowing MSPs to extend their service offerings easily, scale without performance degradation and support their clients’ multi-cloud strategy with persistent, high-availability storage.

MSPs are able to maximise their total cost of ownership, simplicity and scale, which lends itself to multiple use cases. From agile container footprints to micro-services and virtualisation, MSPs are able to drive a single data centre model across regions that provides absolute uptime and high availability. SDS essentially transforms commodity hardware into an elastic, resilient, modern storage solution that allows MSPs to focus on customers and application sets, rather than on the underlying hardware needed to deliver services.