How does the arrival of VMware vCloud Air change the Public Cloud Market in Australia?

By David Barclay, National Practice Manager, Data^#3

While some may say VMware are fashionably late to the Public Cloud arena, few will doubt either their commitment or capability. It’s been less than 18 months since their announcement to deliver a Public Cloud platform and they’ve made significant progress with more than 11 datacentres already live around the globe with the vCloud Air platform.

Now it’s Australia’s turn with the locally hosted vCloud Air service now live. So what do you need to know about vCloud Air and what is the expected impact on the local Public Cloud market?

In answering that question, it’s interesting to consider that 2006 marked the beginning of mainstream adoption of virtualisation technology. That technology quickly took hold of the datacenter with VMware primarily responsible for the phenomenal success of x86 Server virtualisation over this time. Reports suggest that more than 70% of customers use VMware virtualisation technology for their most trusted workloads and those organisations are now looking for the next step in the journey.

vCloud Air is primarily targeted at these types of organisations – they already have an investment in virtualisation and vSphere and are looking to move or replicate existing on-premises workloads to the cloud.

The key benefit lies in the fact that vCloud Air is also based on vSphere, so organisations that have already invested with VMware can extend applications into the cloud without significant reconfiguration required. A true Hybrid Cloud.

IT departments can also view, manage and operate this cloud environment using the platform that they already know, and it is compatible with Hybrid Cloud Powered Services provided by the VMware vCloud Air network of service providers. Having a datacentre located in Australia also benefits those organisations who have data sovereignty concerns or applications that have strict latency requirements.

Other Public Clouds on the other hand typically require a significant amount of re-work to get existing applications to run, so up until now enterprises have been reluctant to move production workloads to the cloud.

Initially there will be three main packages available:

• A Dedicated cloud which includes dedicated physical infrastructure used only by that customer. Minimum specs: 30GHz CPU, 120GB RAM and 6TB of storage, along with 50MB of network bandwidth.
• A Virtual Private Cloud, based on shared resources across a number of customers. Minimum specs: 5GHz CPU20GB of RAM and 2TB of storage.
• A Disaster Recovery service to allow systems to fail over in the event of a problem. This will includes 10Ghz standby CPU, 20GB RAM, 1TB of persistent storage and an “unlimited” number of test failovers.

With further announcements and capabilities still to be added, vCloud Air is set to change the value equation for virtualised enterprises and as a result is predicted to have a major impact on the market.

With Data^#3’s deep expertise in VMware technologies, and now having access to the local vCloud Air platform, we can advise you on how to make the right choices based on your existing environment and your plans for the future.