"Since its debut on May 21, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service has experienced great momentum and success with an over-subscribed Early Access Program, acquiring a strategic beachhead of customers taking full advantage of the ability to extend their applications to the cloud," said Bill Fathers, snior vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Services Business Unit, VMware. "With the new data centers and important new capabilities, we're executing quickly against our vision of a hybrid cloud service that is completely interoperable with existing infrastructure and enables new and existing applications to run without compromise."
vCloud Hybrid Service, built on VMware vSphere®, enables customers to extend the same skills, tools, networking and security models across both on-premises and off-premises environments.
Meeting Customer Demand with New Data Center Locations and Partnerships
VMware is expanding US service availability:
• Three US Data Centers: To meet customer demand, VMware is adding vCloud Hybrid Service in Santa Clara, Calif., and Sterling, Va., complementing its existing Las Vegas, Nev. location.
• Expanded partnership with Savvis: VMware has expanded its partnership with Savvis, a CenturyLink Company, to accelerate adoption of vCloud Hybrid Service. VMware and Savvis will deploy VMware vCloud Hybrid Service within Savvis' North American data center footprint in 2013 and 2014, enabling customers to gain new data center locations for vCloud Hybrid Service and accelerate their move to cloud through access to complementary colocation, managed hosting, managed services and cloud services from Savvis and secure low-latency network services from CenturyLink.
New Hybrid Cloud Capabilities
VMware is making it even easier for customers to take new and existing applications to the cloud with the following new capabilities:
• Direct Connect: Will allow customers to connect their data center network directly to vCloud Hybrid Service over private dedicated networks, providing secure, consistent, high bandwidth connectivity.
• Disaster Recovery as a Service: Will automatically replicate applications and data to vCloud Hybrid Service, providing rapid automated recovery in the event of an outage. Customers can securely and automatically protect their applications with vCloud Hybrid Service for a fraction of the cost of building out additional physical data center capacity.
• Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service: Will provide full support for the open source Cloud Foundry distribution and Pivotal™ CF™. Cloud Foundry allows customers to avoid the complexity of re-architecting of applications to make them run well on public clouds, and avoids lock-in to proprietary cloud APIs.
• VMware Horizon View™ Desktop-as-a-Service: Customers will be able to run Horizon View Desktops on vCloud Hybrid Service, and rapidly deploy new desktops without the expense and effort of procuring and managing physical hardware.
VMware Customers Taking the Fastest Path to Cloud
"Columbia Sportswear has continued to grow over the past few years, driving the company to transform its business and IT infrastructure by implementing a software-defined data center architecture powered by VMware's vCloud Suite," said Michael Leeper, director, global technology, Columbia Sportswear Company. "VMware has an excellent track record of deploying reliable, high-performance, secure clouds that are compatible with existing applications and data center operations. Our long-term vision is to move beyond compute and memory to a software-defined data center, which we believe VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service can be an integral part of reaching that goal."
"At kCura we host an annual user conference called Relativity Fest. Our first goal is to provide unique learning opportunities, including a lot of hands-on labs, similar to VMworld," said Mike Decker, vice president of IT, kCura. "Building out the labs is costly and takes many man hours. VMware vCloud Hybrid Service would allow us to reduce that time and cost in the future by building our lab environment internally, bursting into the service for a short duration, and shutting them down on demand."
Market Acceleration with VMware partners
With vCloud Hybrid Service, channel partners play a key role of integrating private and public clouds and delivering hybrid solutions to customers. VMware engaged with five strategic partners during the Early Access Program, including CDW, SHI, Presidio, ePlus, and Insight, to deliver vCloud Hybrid Service to market. At general availability, dozens of additional partners are coming on board as vCloud Hybrid Service resellers. Also, VMware has joined the EMC Velocity Service Provider Program as a gold level partner with the vCloud Hybrid Service to deliver a differentiated set of EMC Powered™ services for customers moving workloads to the cloud.