VMware plans links to commercial clouds

VMware is working with about 1,000 cloud service providers

Paul Maritz, chief executive of VMware, has used his opening keynote at the VMware 2009 conference in San Francisco to push his vision of the future of virtualisation and cloud computing.

According to Maritz, the company's internal cloud operating system, vSphere, is already providing companies with more flexibility in internal systems, but the next step is to link that with external cloud services so that companies can buy more cloud time on a flexible basis and lower their operating costs.

To this end VMware is working with about 1,000 cloud service providers to ensure that they can link to the company's software. The partners include AT &T, Verizon and Savvis.

At the same time, vSphere will be getting new capacity planning, storage configuration, operational expense planning and data recovery modules to make linking up easier. Once in place, IT managers will be able to build 'virtual datacentres' around specific processes and departments by renting capacity from cloud vendors.

However, work is needed to be done to make sure that applications can run seamlessly in such circumstances. As such the company is offering a vCloud API to the Distributed Management Task Force for consideration and use by developers.

"Otherwise, you'll have the ultimate 'California hotel', where you can check applications in but not be able to get them out," Maritz said.

However, this does have a downside, in that the clouds will only work with VMware-compatible systems and leaves the company open to charges that it is trying to lock in customers rather than offering a true open system.

Maritz said that the vCloud API was an effort to counter that and would provide a more open development platform.