VMware Adds 8th vCloud Data Center, In MelbourneVMware Adds 8th vCloud Data Center, In Melbourne

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VMware has opened a data center in Melbourne, Australia, marking its eighth public cloud data center under its vCloud Air brand. VCloud Air is VMware's name for its public cloud infrastructure centers that are highly compatible with VMware customers' vSphere environments.

The Melbourne location puts a vCloud center in the heart of a concentration of existing VMware vSphere customers, serving the Australian cites including Sydney, Canberra, and Adelaide, along with cities in neighboring New Zealand.

"Australia and New Zealand are two of the highest penetration markets for virtualization," said Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. VMware also as a data center in Tokyo, added last July, giving VMware a still-slender presence in Asia and the South Pacific. VMware is considering additional locations to serve potential customers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China, Lodge said.

VMware will offer an updated disaster recovery service based on virtual machine management from Melbourne, as it does from other vCloud centers. The two-way service provides an offsite disaster recovery service for users who lose a primary data center, and it can be used to replicate backup copies back into the disaster site as soon as its available. VMware announced the bi-directional service in January, and it became available at the end of March.

Of VMware's cloud services, the disaster recovery offering "has been our most successful service introduction," Lodge said in an interview.

[Want to learn more about See VMware Offers 'One-Button' Disaster Recovery In Cloud.]

The Melbourne center will eventually bring Google's BigQuery and other cloud services closer to Australian and New Zealand users as well. VMware and Google have struck up a partnership where some specialized Google services can be used from the vCloud Air facilities. The integration of the services into VMware's facilities is still underway, with no date yet when they will become generally available. Customers will be able to access the services through a single sign-on to their VMware accounts in the Melbourne center, with follow-up Google Compute Cloud accounts needed. VMware will bill the VMware customer for the Google services, based on usage.

The services include Google's Cloud Storage for object storage, BigQuery analytics, NoSQL Cloud Datastore, and Google Cloud DNS for URL/domain name resolutions.

VMware already has US vCloud centers in Santa Clara, Calif.; Las Vegas; Dallas; Sterling, Va.; and Elizabeth, N.J., outside New York. It also operates additional data centers in Slough, England, and in Frankfurt. Lodge declined to say how many servers are installed in the Melbourne facility.

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