VCE and VMware Expand Partnership

At VMworld 2014, VCE Company LLC and VMware, Inc. announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to include new collaborative development initiatives for delivering integrated management solutions for the hybrid cloud.

VCE will integrate its industry converged infrastructure, Vblock Systems, with VMware vCloud Automation Center and VMware vCenter Operations Suite, and provide technology onramps to VMware vCloud Air, enabling customers with management, workload migration and DR between their private and public cloud environments.

vCloud Air is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud offering that enables an organization to extend its private on-premises IT infrastructure to the public cloud. The resulting hybrid cloud is compatible with a customer’s existing IT assets and allows them to build new cloud-native applications, delivering agility and efficiency to the business in a secure, and reliable manner. IT departments can view, manage and operate this ‘best of both worlds’ cloud environment in an unified way using the vSphere platform they already know and trust.

Vblock Systems are pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated converged infrastructures for cloud environments, enabling transformative data center agility, simplicity and economics to enterprises and service providers WW. As part of the VCE experience, Vblock Systems are delivered and supported by VCE as a single product, with component-level updates, lifecycle management and end-to-end vendor accountability.

The expanded partnership will extend the VCE experience to new integrated solutions for cloud management that combine VCE converged infrastructure with VMware vRealize cloud management software into a single system, providing customers with the option to order Vblock Systems pre-installed with VMware vCloud Automation and vCenter Operations Suite, and ready for vCloud Air. The solutions will provide customers with a private cloud that is hybrid cloud-ready, with the technology to migrate workloads to VMware vCloud Air out of the box. The solutions address customer demand for hybrid cloud capabilities with a simplified data center infrastructure that can be expanded over time as application requirements change.

“As more organizations capitalize on the advantages of the hybrid cloud, we are pleased that VCE intends to offer customers a solution to take advantage of vCloud Air’s hybrid services portfolio that includes DR capabilities,” said Bill Fathers, EVP and GM, hybrid cloud services business unit, VMware.

“VCE and VMware are pioneers in delivering exceptional value to customers looking to get the most from their data center investments,” said Todd Pavone, EVP, product strategy and development, VCE. “As the industry continues to shift toward hybrid cloud computing models, we have a significant opportunity to help customers bridge their Vblock-based private cloud environments to VMware vCloud Air with simplified, built-in VMware cloud management and onramps that enable seamless workload migration between clouds. We’re excited to further expand our relationship with VMware, and we believe this new collaboration can unify the tremendous benefits of converged infrastructure and the public cloud, streamlining data center operations and DR for our mutual customers.“

VCE integrated cloud management solutions with VMware vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Suite and vCloud Air are expected to be orderable in the first half of 2015.