Tech Preview: vCloud Air Object Storage

By Mathew Lodge

VMware made some significant announcements today around vCloud Air (previously vCloud Hybrid Service) at VMworld San Francisco 2014. One of the announcements was on a new storage service – vCloud Air Object Storage.

VMware vCloud Air today has two block storage tiers, Standard and SSD-Accelerated, which look to a virtual machine like a block volume. Object Storage acts as low-speed, long-term storage for buckets of unstructured data and isn’t associated with any specific virtual machine.

VMware vCloud Air Object Storage is a highly scalable, cost-effective, and dependable storage solution that can easily scale up to petabytes, and you only pay for the storage in use. Based on EMC’s ViPR technology, it offers the popular S3 API, including lifecycle management and versioning features to simplify and reduce management overhead. Data durability is 11 nines per object, and data can be accessed via HTTP and HTTPS.

One of the differentiating features is support for very large objects up to 20TB in size, in line with the rapid growth in size for media files and other unstructured data. We have a number of other innovations in the pipeline, and will talk about those closer to release.

Object Storage will be available in beta in Q3 2014, and VMware attendees can get a sneak preview at VMworld on Wednesday, August 27, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM in session HBC2599.

To learn more about our upcoming features and capabilities, follow the vCloud blog with your favorite RSS reader, or follow our social channels at @vCloud and Facebook.com/VMwarevCloud.

To get started with vCloud Air, visit vCloud.VMware.com.