VMware opens second UK data centre as part of its hybrid cloud plan
How on the heels of the opening of its first UK data centre in Slough in February, VMware is opening its second just down the road in Chessington.
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The data centre supports the company vCloud Hybrid Service which it launched in Europe in February, and since then it has added disaster recovery and data protection services.
At the launch of the service, the company said that it was targeting businesses with few, if any, in-house IT resources — and especially those that did not have any disaster recovery plan in place already.
Gavin Jackson, VP of cloud services, EMEA, at VMware, said that the announcement was part of a strategy of expansion. "People and companies are really understanding the benefits of the hybrid cloud model now," he said — especially the security that was needed and could now be offered.
Pricing starts at $835 per month, the company said, which entails 1TB of storage, two seven-day disaster recovery tests, and standby cloud capacity with a recovery point objective of up to 15 minutes.
Apart from the two data centres in the UK, VMware has facilities throughout the US and Japan. The company said that since VMware the initial launch of the vCloud Hybrid Service in the UK "more than 800 individuals at partner organisations have been accredited in EMEA".
VMware said that according to a poll of UK customers conducted earlier this year, 65 per cent believed the hybrid cloud could help meet business demands more quickly, while 81 per cent said they needed a solution that makes their public cloud as easy to manage as their own infrastructure.