VMware has opened a second data center in London to cater for demand for its vCloud Hybrid services, designed to offer partners an inroad to selling the Cloud.

The new data center in Chessington, in the south west Greater London region, joins one in Slough, about 40 minutes away, which opened in October last year.

VMware has also opened other sites in the US and Japan for delivery of its cloud platform.

The vCloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering was designed to allow the seamless transferal of data and applications over the Cloud.

In February, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said the aim was to take a snapshot of a user’s environment, physical and virtual, then automatically recreate that in the vCloud Hybrid Service, either in parts or in full.

VMware spent two and a half years developing the service as part of its wider software-defined data center strategy. vCloud focussed on how end users will eventually consume IT as a service.

Channel partners have said the offering is vital to allow them to compete in the age of cloud.

In the US colocation and managed services provider Savvis has been rolling out vCloud in its data centers as part of an orchestrated cloud roadmap.

And in the UK IT infrastructure services company and VMware partner Computacenter has also been offering vCloud as part of its services portfolio.

VMware general manager and VP of cloud services for EMEA Gavin Jackson said customers initially started using the vCloud Hybrid Cloud for specific projects – most recently VMware added disaster recovery and data protection to the offering and Pivotal CF enterprise Platform-as-a-Service scaling technology.

He said demand was being seen for “affordable and seamless” movement of workloads between private and public cloud environments.

“Now they (customers) are turning to it to power their strategic transformation programs,” Jackson said.

“It’s driving real change in the business and enabling organisations to consume services in a totally new way.”

Independent consultancy and SAP partner Bluefin Solutions said it is planning to move all its core on premise systems to the vCloud Hybrid solution once its hardware reaches end of life.

Head of IT Kevin Turnbull said the company is already using the service for moving data and applications across private and public cloud environments.

“We are looking to move everything – including business-critical applications – to a completely hybrid cloud environment with VMware,” Turnbull said.

VMware’s news data center operation will most likely be inside a colo facility – it partnered with Equinix for its operations in slough.

Equinix does not have a footprint in Chessington, but wholesale data center player Digital Realty opened a large facility there in March 2013, offering large chunks of space.

IBM’s SoftLayer cloud services operate out of this 12,000 sq m data center – an announcement about this was made public in July this year.