MELBOURNE: Cloud infrastructure provider VMware has launched its ‘vCloud Air’ service in Australia. Complementing VMware’s vCloud Air Network of service providers, the new VMware-operated location provides customers with a local Asia Pacific IaaS to address local compliance and data locality concerns. This initial VMware vCloud Air deployment in Australia is hosted out of a Telstra connected data center.
“It gives a lot of benefits and opportunities in how we address what is often a very complex question for customers — connectivity for the cloud. We have a lot of reach capability of interconnectivity, and customers can certainly take point-to-point connectivity into the cloud service, as well,” he said.
“What the integration with Next IP gives is a very pervasive, direct connectivity across a large number of customers in the Australian market. So customers on the Next IP network will effectively mean a zero-dollar cost and a zero level of complexity to go and get a secured, high-speed, high-performance vCloud-Air service.”
Datacom, Data#3, Macquarie Telecom, and Deloitte have also been named as managed services providers of the new service. At the same time, customers will also have the option to purchase directly from VMware.
McLean said the vCloud Air platform was designed on the company’s vSphere platform. This means that any migration of applications between a customer’s existing datacentre and the vCloud Air, or vice versa, will be able to occur “seamlessly”.
“We have a platform — and this differs drastically from the public cloud in the market — that we have built reliability and redundancy into the core platform. Our approach is that the platform should support reliable and redundant workloads, and not have customers build those into the applications. This reduces the customer need to retool and redevelop applications,” he said.
Customers will have the option to purchase the suite through a subscription service or on demand.
While no Australian customers were named, VMware hybrid cloud services vice president Matthew Lodge believes that international companies with presence in Australia, such as retailers, will take advantage of the offer.
The arrival of vCloud Air comes 18 months after VMware first said that Australia will be targeted as the company’s premier geography across the Asia-Pacific for its hybrid cloud service, with intentions of pushing the suite out to Australia in mid-2014. A year later, in 2014, the company confirmed that it would not launch until sometime in 2015.
When asked why it has taken the company so long to launch, VMware Australia and New Zealand vice president and managing director Duncan Bennet suggested that the company’s rollout has been pretty quick since it was initially launched in the US.
“In 18 months, we’ve rolled it out to North America, to both the commercial and federal sector; we’ve rolled it out to the UK, we’ve rolled it out to Japan; we’ve rolled it out to Germany; we’ve now rolled it out to Australia. We don’t think that has taken very long,” he said.
Lodge added that by comparison to other players in the market, the arrival of vCloud Air to Australia has happened in a short time.