This morning I was lucky enough to attend the VMware vCHS EMEA launch that took place at the amazing skyline bar and restaurant Paramount in the Centre Point Building, Oxford Street London.
The event was a press focused event that fellow blogger Michael Poore and I were lucky enough to be invited along too, at the event there were presentations by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, David Parry Jones (Regional Director UK and Ireland) as well as Bill Fathers (Senior VP and General Manager vCHS) and Gavin Jackson (VP and General Manager vCloud Services EMEA), alongside VMware were customers from Betfair and Cancer Research UK as well as from VMware partners, Softcat, Computacenter and The Internet Group.
Pat Gelsinger opened the presentation, discussing how the era that we are in now is the most disruptive time in IT ever, with a techtonic shift with the way we are consuming and delivering IT services. We have seen minor tremors of this change so far with the likes of Dell going private and IBM selling its X86 business for only $2.3bn. We are moving to the era of the mobile-cloud which VMware are positioning itself to lead and see vCHS as a major component. Pat Gelsinger spoke about the closure of the acquisition of AirWatch and joked about the experience of writing a $1.5bn cheque.
Pat Gelsinger went onto to talk about vCHS and its importance to VMware and it’s customer, stating that off premise IT growth is by far the largest area of growth today, explaining how current alternatives by competitors deliver locked in models that differ greatly from what they are deploying in their own datacentres. It is the Hybrid nature out of the box that makes vCHS so relevant and easy to adopt, the customers in the room spoke about the ease of using the vCloud Connector to connect their existing VMware Virtual Infrastructures to vCHS during the beta and extending their L2 and L3 networks to vCHS with ease.
With today’s announcement we are seeing for the first time vCHS coming to EMEA and specifically the UK after its launch in the states in September of last year, VMware spoke about the importance of data sovereignty to many organisations, knowing where your data is and which laws legislate over it is critical to many businesses. As such VMware see’s vCHS as a global effort and are planning further expansion in the future. At this stage vCHS EMEA is available from one datacentre in Slough but their are already plans for a second to come online in the UK offering DR as well as further expansion into Europe in general.
Prior to the launch of vCHS in EMEA there was a beta that was oversubscribed by 10x, the most common use cases tested during the beta were test and dev and 100% of beta participants were interested in the DR opportunities that vCHS could offer. These represent the two largest areas we have been speaking to customers about when it comes to cloud adoption. Speaking to Softcat’s Solutions Director Sam Routledge he also see’s DR as being an easy adopter for customers and once trust in this platform exists they will start trusting it more with their production workloads. DR functionality isn’t included out of the box in todays GA but as I understand it there are plans to follow on with this service as soon as possible.
In my opinion vCHS will certainly offer the easiest way for my customers to start to move workloads and adopt the cloud, vCHS is compatible with all versions of vSphere and via the vCloud Connector you are able to move VM’s to and from the cloud from your existing vCenter server with ease. Also speaking to Sam Routledge and Ed Doleman (Head of Channel VMware UK and Ireland) vCHS offers their partners many opportunities past simply just providing their customers with access to vCHS, with the opportunity to create be-spoke services on the platform as well as helping customer to automate, orchestrate and manage their hybrid cloud platforms. Michael Bischoff CIO of Betfair spoke about the importance of automation in making vCHS work for them in their environments during the beta testing.
I am looking forward over the coming weeks to achieving the partner accreditation’s and starting to talk to my customers about the opportunities vCHS provides. I will also be looking to blog my experiences.
If you want to learn more a good place to start it here >> http://vmwareforyou.co.uk/vchs/
