This week, VMware revealed details of its Infrastructure as a Service platform, vCloud Hybrid Service. Based on the premise that enterprise customers are interested in a cloud offering marked by an extension of the technology within their datacenters, VMware announced a cloud solution built around the VMware virtualization technologies with which the enterprise is deeply familiar. VMware’s offering is branded as a hybrid cloud because it enables customers to transport workloads back and forth between their public cloud platform and private customer data centers in ways that allow enterprises to leverage private and public cloud solutions in tandem as dictated by their business needs.
Key features of the VMware IaaS vCloud Hybrid Service include the following:
•IaaS platforms delivered through VMware service providers that provides vCloud Datacenter Services to enable customers to provision virtual environments with ease. vCloud Datacenter Services feature SLAs guaranteeing uptime of 99.5%, role based access control and the ability to configure stacks for compliance with SAS 70 Type II or ISO27001 standards.
•A choice of dedicated or virtual private cloud solutions. A dedicated solution offers customers “physically isolated infrastructure” in contrast to the “logically isolated infrastructure” specific to a virtual private cloud solution.
•An IaaS infrastructure delivered by certified VMware service providers such as AT&T Inc., Bluelock, Colt, CSC, Dell Services, Optus, SingTel, Softbank, T-Systems
•vCloud Connector 2.0 enables customers to transfer workloads between private datacenters and VMware public clouds. Customers can effect the transfer of workloads betweeen infrastructures by using one network configuration instead of reconfiguring network settings in the destination infrastructure. Additionally, customers can manage the transfer of data between different infrastructures with “One Catalog” that synchronizes the list of available content across all relevant infrastructures, thereby avoiding the scenario whereby customers are forced to manage multiple content catalogs concurrently.
Because VMware’s IaaS vCloud Hybrid Service is delivered through a cluster of service partners, the offering is fundamentally different from the IaaS product offerings of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. VMware plans to make its vCloud Hybrid Service technology and IP available to all service partners, and promises to build one of the most extensive IaaS partnerships for public cloud computing available in the world today. The product effectively gives new meaning to the term cloud interoperability given that customers can transfer workloads not only between private enterprise datacenters and public clouds enabled by VMware’s service partners, but also between VMware’s public cloud, partner datacenters as well. vCloud Hybrid Service will be available through an early access program in June and anticipates becoming generally available in Q3 of this year.
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