VMware public cloud gets vCloud Air SQL, Site Recovery Manager Air, object storage

VMware today announced several enhancements to its vCloud Air public cloud at the company’s annual VMworld conference in San Francisco.

Companies can test and run plans for disaster recovery in vCloud Air’s new cloud-based Site Recovery Manager Air. And VMware is starting to offer disaster recovery on vCloud Air based on usage, instead of just as part of a monthly or yearly subscription.

“Customers pay a flat fee for each VM [virtual machine] protected and the amount of storage consumed by the VMs,” VMware said in a statement on the news. “When a DR [disaster recovery] test is run or a DR event occurs, customers only pay for the compute consumed when VMs are running.”

VMware is also introducing vCloud Air Object Storage powered by Google Cloud Platform, the first new product to come out of VMware’s reseller relationship with Google, announced earlier this year. It should become generally available by Sept. 30. (Google has a blog post on the new product here.) A related product based on parent company EMC’s ViPR software, vCloud Air Object Storage powered by EMC should become available in an early access program by the same date.

These updates and others from VMware this week show how the company is looking to become a formidable contender in the cloud infrastructure market. VMware has become a major provider of on-premises software for virtualization, which enables several virtual machines to run on top of each physical server. But companies are depending on public clouds to a greater and greater extent. Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, brought in almost $6 billion in revenue in the year that ended on June 30.

VMware, which as an entire company generated just over $6 billion in revenue in 2014, counts many large companies in its user base, and today’s additions to the product lineup reflect that to some extent. Disaster recovery, for instance, is a priority, with two announcements in that area.

Still, VMware is taking steps to provide the basic components that other cloud providers offer.

The release of the new vCloud Air SQL database as a service, which will become available in an early access program in the fourth quarter of this year, and the new object storage services — which were first announced at VMworld in San Francisco last year — give VMware features that many of the top cloud providers have.

VMware is also announcing today Hybrid Cloud Manager, a new tool to plug into the vSphere virtualization software that should help on-premises do more with application deployments that extend into vCloud Air.

“This solution provides workload migration, data center extension and enhanced hybrid management within the vSphere Web Client, including support for VM migration,” VMware said in a statement.

Find all of our coverage of VMworld 2015 here.