News

VMware Partners With Google on Cloud Services

Four services will be initially offered; more to come.

• By Keith Ward
• 01/29/2015

VMware, in an effort to beef up its cloud platform, announced today that it's integrating select Google Cloud Platform services like analytics, storage and database. The announcement came via a blog posting by Mathew Lodge, vice president of Cloud Services. Four services are being folded into vCloud Air:

• Google Cloud Storage. Distributed low-cost object storage service
• Google BigQuery. A real-time analytics service suitable for ad-hoc business intelligence queries across billions of rows of data in seconds
• Google Cloud Datastore. A schema-less NoSQL database service
• Google Cloud DNS. A globally-distributed low-latency DNS service

Existing vCloud Air customers will be able to access the services, once available, under the terms of their existing contracts. They'll have to pay for the services used, but won't have to do anything additional to connect to the services. Standard vCloud Air credentials will be all that's needed; it will allow access to the service and the native Google Cloud Platform APIs.

The collaboration between the sometime-rivals goes deeper, though: "We're also directly connecting the VMware and Google networks together," Lodge blogged, "so that all traffic between the services travels over a dedicated private connection."

Integration has started, and VMware said it expects to make the offering live during the first half of this year. It also said that additional services will be added in the future. Google Cloud Platform is a collection of modular services, and includes other services like translation APIs, cloud endpoints, cloud SQL and compute engine.

The Google announcement is the latest in a wave of vCloud Air upgrades from VMware. Within the last two weeks, vCloud Air added on-demand service with just a credit card, as well as disaster recovery and advanced networking and security enhancements.