vCloud Hybrid Service launches two new offerings

Yesterday vCloud Hybrid Service launched two new offerings and released them into the public cloud.  This is of personal interest to me as I was the Tech Marketing lead for these two new releases.  For me, being part of the team that is launching these offerings, and the rapid speed of delivery and growth within VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service gives me great pleasure, and pride.  Anyway, lets get on with the technical stuff.

Standard Storage Tier

First up is storage tiering.  vCHS now offers two types of storage tier.  SSD Accelerated and Standard.  SSD-Accelerated is exactly that, an SSD-Accelerated tier, that uses SSD Caching to increase the performance.  Standard storage is slightly different, it is just plain old spindle based storage without any SSD Acceleration, resulting in a lower performance.  As The Register puts it “Plain old spinning rust”.  For me, its an important part of cloud, offering multiple types of storage and performance is critical to being able to run your tier one applications.  Some applications don’t need high performing storage, and as a consumer of cloud resources, you simply want the cheapest thing you can get your hands on to host workloads out in the cloud.

The official VMware blog release can be read here: VMware vCloud Hybrid Service Standard Storage Tier

This is the demo video showing how storage tiering in vCloud Hybrid Service actually works:

Data Protection

Data Protection is a really important offering for vCloud Hybrid Service.  Data Protection is a self-service backup offering, that gives granular control to the consumer.  Being able to have that backup safety net for your workloads, and knowing they are secure is massive.  Anyone who has listened to me present about vCloud Director and cloud over the years, has always heard me talk about how difficult backups have been. My own personal workloads that I run in the cloud, have had numerous “workarounds” in place to ensure I have some kind of data backup, but restores were never the easy part.  Now with Data Protection, this is made really simple.  For me, this is a critical piece in the cloud. In my opinion, its a really nice, easy and simple solution that has been delivered.

Just look at the feature list, its pretty comprehensive:

The official VMware blog can be read here: vCloud Hybrid Service – Data Protection

Demo’s will be available soon, and I will update with the links when I have them

Trial Accounts

Finally, if you have been awarded vExpert 2014 status, you can sign up for a 30 day free trial of vCloud Hybrid Service.  Click here to read the article and find out more information.