VMware Announces vCloud Hybrid Service – Gateway To Its Own Public Cloud

Virtualisation specialist VMware has announced the vCloud Hybrid Service , an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud built with VMware’s vSphere and completely interoperable with the company’s existing virtual infrastructure.

The new product could challenge two of the dominating public cloud platforms on the market: Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure, which, as of last month, runs operating systems beyond Windows.

Despite its potential to disrupt the IaaS market, the vCloud Hybrid Service is primarily aimed at VMware’s existing customers, offering the “easiest, fastest path to cloud”. It will be available in the third quarter of 2013, and is expected to cost more than rival services.

If you build it, they will come

According to Gartner, sales of IaaS products will surge by an average 38 percent annually to around £20.2 billion by 2017. VMware has entered the fight for this huge market with vCloud Hybrid Service, which promises to help users switch to the public cloud without the risk and cost associated with rolling out new infrastructure.

“VMware’s mission is to radically simplify IT and help customers transform their IT operations,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of the company. “Today, with the introduction of the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, we take a big step forward by coupling all the value of VMware virtualisation and software-defined data centre technologies with the speed and simplicity of a public cloud service that our customers desire.”

The vCloud Hybrid Service allows administrators to use familiar tools, networking and security models across both in-house and outside infrastructure, according to the EMC-owned company. It supports thousands of applications and more than 90 operating systems that are certified to run on vSphere, and offers the same reliability features – automated replication, monitoring and high availability, VMware said.

To ease the transition, IT staff will be able to view, manage and migrate virtual machines from the vSphere client using the free vCloud Connector plug-in.

“We know there are many cloud offerings to choose from, but only vCloud Hybrid Service is built on the same platform that VMware customers use in their own data centres.  Those customers have expressed a desire for a cloud offering that is completely compatible with what they are deploying internally and is built on the trusted, reliable foundation they have come to expect from VMware,” said Bill Fathers, senior VP and GM of the Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit at VMware.

According to Total Telecom, VMware has partnered with SAP from the get-go, in order to offer HANA analytics software on the new platform through a subscription.

“The SAP ecosystem plays a vital role in helping our customers be best-run businesses. Today’s announcement with VMware is yet another example of how our collaboration with partners provides additional options for customers to deploy SAP solutions,” said Bill McDermott, Co-CEO of SAP.

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