VMware Reverses Announcement to Enter Public Cloud
VMware Reverses Announcement to Enter Public Cloud by UCStrategies Staff
An announcement from VMware’s vCloud team seemed to confirm the intention of the vendor to become active in the public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service space, but all notion of this ended shortly afterwards.
On Friday at 11am Pacific time, the vCloud team tweeted: “VMware is prepping a vCloud based public cloud service!”
The Twitter message appeared to look like an official communication from the vCloud team, and the account also oversees products like vSphere, vCloud Director and vCloud Connector. However, the tweet was removed soon after the vendor was contacted about it, and refused to add comment.
The public cloud IaaS from VMware is presently in available in beta format, and will be released in mid-April. In an effort to discourage customers from using Amazon EC2, the Palo Alto, California-based vendor is seeking to provide users with a means of moving on-premise private cloud workloads to public cloud infrastructure owned and operated by the company.
As VMware has previously allowed this market segment to be developed by its service provider partners (the majority of whom are VMware customers), the company’s move to the public cloud space is a sensitive issue. The risk is that VMware may displease customers with the competitive implications, and might also encourage some of them to focus on OpenStack and CloudStack.
Also involved in the project is EMC, the parent company of VMware, and engineers are being provided in order to develop integration with EMC’s Avamar line of backup recovery products.
Embedding vSphere into EMC’s VNX storage products (optimized for virtual apps) could allow VNX to tie seamlessly into the VMware public cloud.
In addition to slowly the growth of Amazon in the public cloud space, VMware is also keen to demonstrate the ability of its products (like DynamicOps and vCenter Operations) in making the public cloud more accessible for enterprises.
It remains uncertain what the price of VMware’s public cloud IaaS will be, but taking the company’s previous reputation into consideration, it is unlikely that they will undercut their pricing to risk alienating partners.
vCloud services are presently offered by 211 service providers in 31 countries, and VMware will therefore have to be careful not to damage those relationships. (CY)Link