VMware unveils pay as you go cloud for enterprise

VMware has teamed up with hosting partners to offer easy access to cloud computing for enterprises.

As part of its vCloud initiative, the new VMware Express programme will let customers use their credit cards to access pay-as-you-go cloud computing services from service providers such as Savvis, Terremark, Verizon Business and others.

Customers will be able to move virtualised pieces of their system using VMware's vSphere onto external clouds from the partners with just a few clicks, the vendors promised at VMware's conference in San Francisco today.

While it sounds comparable to Amazon's "elastic compute cloud" - which the web giant has been offering for years - VMware's system is targetted at corporations rather than web sites or developers, with some dubbing it "platform as a service" or "computing as a service".

The various vendors promised enterprise would be able to access cloud services over virtual private networks and move applications from data centre to the cloud without shutting down. Savvis chief executive Bryan Doerr suggested the cloud could offer multi tiered quality of service, tailoring the power, security or other aspects of a service to the requirements of a specific application.

While the cloud offerings based on VMware's vSphere are ready to go in "the here and now", as VMware chief executive Paul Maritz said, the vendors admitted some companies aren't ready for the cloud, and many mission critical applications will be slow to move there.

VMware also announced a set of APIs to connect in - and out of - vSphere data centres. Maritz again stressed the importance of not only moving data into the cloud, but being able to easily move it out of the cloud.

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