VMWare’s vCloud Hybrid Service offers on or off premise choice
Tue 8 Apr 2014
In February 2014 VMware launched its vCLoud Hybrid Services in London. This European launch has also involved an over subscribed beta testing programme that has been running for several months now. Its participants included organisations such as Betfair and Cancer Research – both of whom are said to be very happy with the results they achieved.
Joe Baguley, CTO of VMWare, said that his firm has been doing exactly what its customers wanted. In other words he claims that his cloud “is truly seamless, designed to be an extension of their existing data centres.” This means that migration doesn’t come into the equation. Customers aren’t required to change anything in their processes, orchestration or support. All they need to do is buy vCloud under their existing on-premise licences.
“Yet if someone is in the VMWare management client, then they will be offered the choice of being able to run it on or off-premise”, he added. Cancer Research couldn’t afford the onsite overheads relating to the demand for IT resources. So it made sense for the organisation to opt for the off-premise solution in order to keep costs down. Customers more generally opt to use vCloud for disaster recovery from a destination that he claims to support everything.
“We support 90 different operating systems on-premise and now in our cloud service, so you can bring enterprise or packaged apps to our cloud service”, he comments before talking about software-defined datacentres. They are about the virtualisation of ‘compute’, networking and storage – forming part of one converged infrastructure for the enterprise.
“We are building a layer of software that allows you to build anything on top of it; the converged infrastructure is interesting, but we’re going towards a white box future”, he forecasted. In his opinion converged infrastructure is being sold predominantly as a set of managed services, but this will change as the value is moving towards software.
In the meantime, VMWare also concluded its acquisition of Airwatch in February 2014. He commented that his company is “offering a solution for the mobile cloud world; the world has changed because if people want access to their data and applications on any device at any time, then there has to be a balance between security, compliance and risk.”
He concludes that VMWare is “expanding [its] capabilities to build the software-defined enterprise.” The focus is therefore on building, managing and delivering applications for the future. He therefore believes that this means that the “end-user piece is the last bit in the road because IT still think it has ownership of everything, but it doesn’t have to have it all. So his company hopes to help IT with VMware’s solutions to complete this transition.
Graham Jarvis
