VMware intros vCloud Hybrid Service to bridge cloud with datacenters
Monday was all about mergers and acquisitions in the technology industry, and Tuesday might be all about new product announcements. PayPal and Microsoft have their own more consumer-friendly debuts today, but VMware has something in store for the enterprise bunch.
Enter vCloud Hybrid Service, touted by the EMC subsidiary to quite simply extend the datacenter to the cloud.
Basically, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service is meant to extend VMware software to the public cloud for use across both on-premise and off-premise environments.
For example, VMware touted that the platform will enable customers to use virtual networking to securely extend existing Layer 2 or Layer 3 networks from their datacenters to the vCloud Hybrid Service.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger explained during a media event in Palo Alto, Calif. on Tuesday morning that the “chasm” between business leaders and their IT departments is growing, and IT is falling behind as businesses want to move forward more quickly despite compliance and security risks.
"To us, that’s what hybrid cloud is all about," Gelsinger summed up in introducing the vCloud Hybrid Service, built on same VMware software stack and software-defined datacenter infrastructure.
"Seamlessness starts with the software-defined datacenter," which Gelsinger asserted allows us to make this “bold” statement: any application, any place, any cloud without any changes.
Bill Fathers, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s newly-formed Hybrid Cloud Services business unit, suggested that the hybrid approach is best for developing apps that need the elasticity of a public cloud but also harbor data sensitive enough to require on-premise hosting.
Fathers cited there are already 37 applications certified to run on the vCloud Hybrid Service. He added that VMware has also inked a deal to declare itself as the only cloud provider for SAP HANA applications for subscriptions either on-premise or in the cloud.
Beyond that, VMware has a partner ecosystem of more than 55,000 companies, including SAP, Microsoft, and Tibco.
VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is available starting today through an early access program. General availability for U.S. customers is scheduled to follow during the third quarter. The roadmap for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia will be revealed later this year.
Customers have two subscription options. The first is a dedicated service with physically isolated and reserved compute resources and a private cloud instance, which will be sold on an annual basis starting at 13 cents per hour.
The second possibility is a virtual private cloud with a multi-tenant compute resource model and dedicated allocations for customers. This one is sold on a monthly basis starting at 4.5 cents per hour.
Screenshots via VMware