Facilities owned by the US data center operator Digital Realty have started offering direct connections to VMware’s vCloud Air public cloud platform.

The Direct Connect feature enables customers to extend their existing workloads into the cloud using a dedicated private line, whenever additional resources are needed.

Cloud extension
vCloud Air (previously known as ‘vCloud Hybrid Service’) includes infrastructure, disaster recovery, and various application-as-a-service offerings, built on vSphere and compatible with on-premises data centers.

It doesn’t come cheap, but VMware claims that Air delivers twice the compute power of Microsoft Azure (likely excluding the D-Series VMs announced last week) and three times the storage performance of AWS. Interestingly, it also supports more versions of Windows than Azure.

Now, Digital Realty customers will be able to access this level of performance without leaving the safety of their own network.

“By offering pre-provisioned and on-demand services operated by VMware, we will eliminate the often burdensome process of cloud connectivity by providing our clients with a seamless extension to the cloud from their existing data center locations in our facilities," explained Matt Miszewski, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Digital Realty.

For a limited time, Digital Realty customers who place Direct Connect orders will be able to access a special promotion – a free 1GB Ethernet circuit for a year including cross-connects, plus a 15 percent discount on vCloud Air services for the lifetime of new contracts.