VMware is moving to combine the data center facilities it owns with those of its service provider partners into a VMware vCloud Air Network to create a federated cloud computing environment that will span both private and public cloud computing environments.

VMware built its Hybrid Cloud Service to provide a VMware public cloud service to IT organizations. Now the VMware service formally known as vCloud Hybrid Services will be replaced by the VMware vCloud Air Network, which adds the cloud computing capabilities of VMware service partners. Angelos Kottas, director of product marketing for the offering says the approach not only helps VMware defer some of the cost of building a public cloud service; it should also give customers more control over where their data is placed in the cloud.

Expanding cloud services

Kottas says the VMware vCloud Air Network is more than just a cloud computing alliance. VMware will use the service to significantly expand its cloud computing services beyond the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), disaster recovery and virtual desktop capabilities it offers today.

VMware, says Kottas, will use the federated cloud to bring a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering to market based on the instance of Cloud Foundry-created Pivotal, a fellow EMC sister company. Just as importantly from the perspective of managed service providers, Kottas says VMware will also push the management of both hybrid cloud computing environments into the cloud as well some of the mobile management services provided by AirWatch, which is now a unit of VMware. In all those instances, those services with be branded under the VMware vCloud Air Network moniker, says Kottas.

Kottas says VMware envisions VMware vCloud Air Network services spanning both public clouds and private cloud that may be running on premise or in a managed hosting facility; with application workloads moving between private and public instances of the cloud on demand.

Easy route to market

For VMware service partners the existence of the VMware vCloud Network creates a route to market through which they can leverage VMware and its channel to resell their cloud services. For VMware, being able to tap into that extended cloud means that they can defer some of the capital expense associated with creating a global cloud computing network. Kottas says there will still be times when VMware will offer a service that directly competes with one offered by its service provider partners. But overall, the VMware vCloud Air Network provides the critical mass in the cloud that VMware needs to effectively compete against Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft.

As customers move more application workloads to the cloud they are demanding two primary things. One is control over where their data is placed in order to better navigate any number of industry regulations and legal requirements. The second is performance. IT organizations want to be able to place application workloads as close to where those applications are going to be consumed to minimize network latency in the cloud. Both of those requirements require federated management capabilities to exist across multiple geographically dispersed data centers. In the case of VMware, that federated cloud computing environment will henceforth be known as the VMware vCloud Air Network.