Tier 3 today announced that its Enterprise Cloud Platform public cloud service has achieved VMware vCloud Powered status, illustrating to customers that the company’s cloud services are underpinned by VMware’s leading virtualization and cloud computing technology, namely VMware vSphere® and VMware vCloud Director. A member of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) , Tier 3—via its VMware vCloud Powered service, the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform—delivers a set of cloud computing services across a common platform, supporting the largest set of existing applications, and offering the distinctive application mobility only available from VMware.

“High performing production applications in the cloud require enterprise-quality virtual machines offered in an enterprise-grade cloud platform. VMware is the standard for enterprise virtualization and is the ultimate ‘check box’ new customers tick off when considering Tier 3 for an enterprise-grade cloud,” said Jared Wray, chief technology officer, Tier 3. “When VMware vCloud technologies are combined with our unique intellectual property in virtualization, security and automation, enterprise customers get a highly available, secure, enterprise-grade hybrid cloud with management capabilities consistent with their own virtualized, private cloud implementations.“ 

“The VMware vCloud® Powered program was developed to enable our service provider partners to differentiate themselves and help them bring their enterprise-class cloud services to market in this competitive landscape,“ said Don Schleicher, vice president of service providers for VMware. “We look forward to supporting Tier 3 further as it enables the agility and performance customers are looking for in the cloud computing landscape.”

Customers of Tier 3 have the ability to move workloads from their VMware vSphere-based virtualized or private cloud environment to the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud and back again. This application portability is a key differentiator giving customers the flexibility and security they need while enabling increased IT agility. Tier 3’s enterprise cloud platform incorporates intelligence, automation and virtualization technology across every layer of the platform to provide unprecedented performance and agility. vSphere 4, vCloud Director and vCenter Operations are standard in the Tier 3 platform today. Support for vSphere 5 and the entire VMware cloud infrastructure suite will arrive in late Q3. 

According to Wray, testing of vSphere 5 with the Tier 3 enterprise cloud platform already shows performance quickly approaching that of physical hardware, specifically in regards to threading on multiple threading applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Hadoop. “With vSphere 5, we will be able to run mission-critical production apps on a virtual machine,” he concluded.

Tier 3 sought VMware vCloud Powered validation in order to enable enterprises to more confidently and cost effectively employ a true hybrid cloud environment by easily provisioning public cloud resources that are compatible with existing VMware infrastructure, and quickly and securely extend virtualized workloads to the public cloud. As a validated provider, Tier 3 can now provide users with unprecedented responsiveness and agility, and reduced IT costs through increased consolidation, task automation and simplified management.