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Virtacore Debuts VMware vCloud Express, An On-Demand Self-Service Cloud Offering

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Virtacore Systems, provider of hybrid cloud services, has announced the availability of the company’s vCloud Express offering. The public cloud solution, based on VMware vCloud technology, provides virtual servers from a shared resource pool for a low monthly cost.

One of only two global providers to offer vCloud Express, Virtacore vCloud Express provides organizations with an on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure that meets the needs of organizations seeking a flexible and affordable infrastructure.

Terremark Debuts vCloud Express Service

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Terremark recently announced the addition of the vCloud Express service to its suite of VMware Virtualized offerings.

vCloud Express is a new class of service based on VMware’s powerful virtualization platform that allows software developers and other users to easily access computing resources in a pay-as-you-go model. vCloud Express will provide customers with flexible computing on demand, with the power and control to configure resources as needed. It uniquely offers users compatibility with their internal datacenters, as well as Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud offering, enabling users to move applications to the production environment of their choice.

Customers will be able to easily sign up for the service online with a credit card and immediately begin provisioning computing capacity using Terremark’s intuitive Web console. Integrated firewalls, load balancing and network management features allow users to easily customize their cloud environment to their specific needs. Users will also be able to access their cloud computing environments via the VMware vCloud™ API, enabling interoperability across internal and external clouds. A Terremark vCloud Express community website featuring expert blogs, support forums and product documentation will provide customers with an interactive platform to receive up-to-date information and insights from Terremark’s team of cloud computing experts.

With the addition of vCloud Express, Terremark is expanding its suite of industry-leading infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. These solutions will leverage VMware’s robust and advanced enterprise-class platform and Terremark’s top-tier, massively connected datacenter facilities to deliver high-performance cloud computing services to the developer market.

Terremark’s strategic move into the cloud computing market began with the June 2008 launch of the Enterprise Cloud, a highly reliable and secure platform with the power to dynamically provision computing resources for mission-critical applications. Designed to meet the high security and regulatory standards of large enterprises and Federal government agencies, the Enterprise Cloud leverages a full suite of managed security services and unique “burst” option to offer customers a highly secure and elastic platform to meet their IT infrastructure needs.

Terremark’s vCloud Express will initially be launched in a limited-availability beta program, with a full launch scheduled by the end of 2009.

VMware announces VMware vCloud Express, goes head to head with Amazon EC2

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VMware today announced vCloud Express, a new class of service that will deliver on-demand, pay-as-you-go computing power as a service, much like Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Built on VMware vSphere, vCloud Express enables to quickly start using enterprise quality computing platforms based on vSphere. As the vCloud environments are based on vSphere, it is easy to import and export workloads between the internal IT environment and external cloud providers.

VMware vCloud Express will be available through many service providers. Several of them are launching beta releases of these services today. Among those are Terremark, Hosting.com They can be found through the VMware Website.

So far, this field has been dominated by Amazon. The vCloud Express solution will probably kickstart some serious competition, both on price and service levels. Several “big names” announced support for vCloud and vCloud Express today. Since debuting the vCloud initiative at VMworld 2008 last year, more than 1000 service providers have signed up. Today the spotlight is on a few of the bigger “enterprise” cloud providers, that are collaborating closely with VMware on the vCloud API.

VMware submitted the vCloud API to DMTF to get it certified as an open standard, to ensure customers can “get their data out of the cloud” if needed, and to allow interoperability between different clouds.

Enterprise infrastructure providers

Several large infrastructure providers announced their own vSphere based cloud offerings. AT&T, Verizon Business, SAVVIS and Terremark all announced similar offerings.

Software providers
Several software providers already support the vCloud API to automatically provision virtual appliances to vCloud-compatible service providers. This greatly facilitates software distribution. Several of these VM build services like CohesiveFT and rPath have announced support for vCloud.

More open source competition coming up

While VMware only spoke about Amazon EC2, another interesting development is the Xen Cloud Platform, an initiative of the Xen Project to enable completely open source cloud infrastructures. XCP was announced yesterday. The Xen project will build upon the work done by projects like the Eucalyptus Project and OpenNebula to create what basically is an open source equivalent of the vSphere / vCloud stack.

Citrix, a major contributor to the Xen Project and a major competitor of VMware, is expected to announce a commercial XCP offering soon.