Published on the 05/11/2014 | Written by Newsdesk
VMware has announced that it is working with Telstra and other local partners in order to deliver an Australian hosted version of its vCloud Air service available next year…
The announcement of a locally hosted version of its cloud has been timed to coincide with VMware’s Australian user conference currently underway in Sydney which has attracted a record 7200 registrations according to local vice president and managing director Duncan Bennet.
Three core service offerings are anticipated under the vCloud Air banner – a dedicated cloud, a virtual private cloud and a disaster recovery as a service cloud. This is the second time the company has had a crack at offering its stack in a cloud in Australia, but this time it believes it has the setting right to encourage enterprises to consider moving their workloads out to a public cloud.
Dan McLean, director of cloud and service provider sales for VMware Australia said the dedicated cloud offering will be provided out of a physically isolated section of a local data centre.
The disaster recovery cloud meanwhile is set up as a virtual data centre “with point and click configuration for the user,” he said. Subscribers to that service can have access to unlimited numbers of test failovers and access to 30 days of service in the event of a disaster as part of the standard subscription.
VMware also announced a partnership with Deloitte Consulting which will help customers with “cloud enabled business transformations” according to technology partner Kevin Russo. This will include the rollout of SAP solutions as a service.
VMware sponsored a survey of 112 IT Australian IT professionals conducted by IDC Australia mid-year which found that around two thirds of Australian organisations expected that hybrid cloud – blending public and private offerings – would be part of the standard IT compendium by 2020.
IDC associate vice president Chris Morris acknowledged this was a little lower than global expectations, where public cloud, driven largely by line-of-business requirements was being adopted rapidly. “The CIO role that is evolving is as a broker of services,” said Morris, noting this involved “a bit of a balancing act between efficiency and effectiveness”.
While the service was announced yesterday it won’t be available until sometime in the first half of 2015. It will be hosted initially in Telstra’s recently commissioned Melbourne data centre, but Bennet reinforced that VMware was not offloading the management of vCloud Air: “This cloud is owned, operated and managed by VMware,” he said.
