Broadcom launches VMware Tanzu Data Services

For admins who are responsible for delivering data services on private cloud, the release said that benefits of the new services include simplified lifecycle management, enhanced security and compliance, experts on-call, and built-in configurations for “high availability, multi data center replication and backup.”

Asked for his reaction to the launch, John Annand, practice lead at Info-Tech Research Group, said, “there is a fun contrast in VMware by Broadcom these days. On the one hand, you have an amazingly ambitious call to action from [Broadcom CEO] Hock Tan, not just for enterprise adoption of private cloud, but also private AI — complex and complicated technologies with a plethora of nerd knobs for the enterprise to configure (or misconfigure). But VMware promises to make that easy and accessible for the average enterprise IT admin.”

Now, he said, “they announce Tanzu Data Services — is it going to be a similarly wide reaching and infinitely customizable and tweakable offering? No —  two database types, a message queue, and a caching engine. Is it comprehensive? Certainly not. Is it enough to play in their target market? I would have to say yes.”

 According to Annand, “VMware by Broadcom is not looking to capture the advanced data sciences market with this offering, just like Tanzu is not the software development platform for bleeding edge dev shops. Their sweet spot is enterprise business leaders with a desire for control who are in tension with hipster dev teams who want to move fast and break things. PostgreSQL and MySQL are perfectly fine relational databases (though you would wonder why not MariaDB), RabbitMQ is great, and Valkey is fine.”

All in all, he said, it is a “complete set of tools (though not perhaps the ones every individual admin/engineer would have picked) for an MVP [minimum viable product] data service. Add that to the SDLC [software development lifecycle] and workload placement services of Tanzu, along with the GPU and model management from VMWare Private AI, and risk adverse management can now check the box they have given the dev teams [the tools that] will accomplish the job.”

Annand added, “there is an old adage that the hallmark of a good compromise is that you have satisfied no one. Tanzu Data Services should do at least a little better than that low bar. Does it compete toe to toe with the myriad of options available in public cloud data service platforms? Not at all.”