VMware Launches vCloud Hybrid Cloud

VMworld-vCloudHybrid

A visual overview of VMware's vCloud Hybrid (Image: VMware)

At the VMworld 2013 event underway this week in San Francisco, VMware (VMW) announced a new vCloud Hybrid Service, new data center locations, and new capabilities to bring existing and new cloud-native applications to the public cloud. The new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud,operated by VMware was unveiled last May.

"Since its debut on May 21, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service has experienced great momentum and success with an over-subscribed Early Access Program, acquiring a strategic beachhead of customers taking full advantage of the ability to extend their applications to the cloud," said Bill Fathers, senior vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. "With the new data centers and important new capabilities, we're executing quickly against our vision of a hybrid cloud service that is completely interoperable with existing infrastructure and enables new and existing applications to run without compromise."

U.S. service availability for the vCloud Hybrid Cloud begins in September, and will be delivered from three data centers - in Santa Clara, California; Sterling, Virginia; and Las Vegas, Nevada.  VMware is also expanding its partnership with Savvis to accelerate adoption of the new service. VMware and Savvis will deploy VMware vCloud Hybrid Service within Savvis' North American data center footprint in 2013 and 2014, enabling customers to gain new data center locations for vCloud Hybrid Service.

“Savvis is proud to expand our VMware partnership to integrate our offerings with VMware vCloud Hybrid Service,” said Jeff Von Deylen, president of Savvis. “Customers using VMware vCloud Hybrid Service will benefit from our broad portfolio of network, colocation, managed hosting, managed services and cloud services to enable custom IT solutions. Hybrid cloud customers are looking for the kind of secure, low-latency network connectivity solutions that Savvis and CenturyLink can provide.”

New hybrid capabilities will make application migration easier. Direct Connect will let customers connect to their data center network directly, over private dedicated networks. Disaster Recovery as a service will automatically replicate applications and data to vCloud Hybrid Service - to securely protect applications at a fraction of the cost of building out additional physical capacity. Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service will provide full support for the open source Cloud Foundry distribution and Pivotal CF. Finally, VMware Horizon View Desktop-as-a-Service will be able to run Horizon View Desktops on vCloud Hybrid Service, and rapidly deploy new desktops.

"Columbia Sportswear has continued to grow over the past few years, driving the company to transform its business and IT infrastructure by implementing a software-defined data center architecture powered by VMware's vCloud Suite," said Michael Leeper, director, global technology, Columbia Sportswear Company. "VMware has an excellent track record of deploying reliable, high-performance, secure clouds that are compatible with existing applications and data center operations. Our long-term vision is to move beyond compute and memory to a software-defined data center, which we believe VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service can be an integral part of reaching that goal."

vCloud Hybrid Service Dedicated Cloud will provide physically isolated and reserved compute resources with pricing starting at 13 cents an hour for a fully protected, fully redundant 1 GB virtual machine with 1 processor. vCloud Hybrid Service Virtual Private Cloud will offer multi-tenant compute with full virtual private network isolation. Virtual Private Cloud pricing starting at 4.5 cents an hour for a fully protected, fully redundant 1GB virtual machine with 1 processor.

VMware also launched a new vCloud Hybrid Service Marketplace, where customers can find all the software they need to extend their data centers to the cloud. In the Marketplace customers can discover, download and launch solutions for the vCloud Hybrid Service.