Telstra eats its own VMware-flavoured hybrid cloud dog food

Telstra's not only hosting the Australian incarnation of VMware's vCloud Air public cloud, it's also using it.

So says no less a figure than VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, who in the company's quarterly earnings call on Tuesday said “Telstra, will be leveraging VMware software defined datacenter architecture to deliver infrastructure as a service for both internal IT consumption and public-facing IAAS services.”

That Telstra would host the Australian incarnation of vCloud Air is well and truly on the record: after flagging a desire to work with Telstra in 2013, VMware announced the carrier had come aboard in November 2014 and the pair launched the local service in April 2015.

But until Gelsinger mentioned internal consumption, the extent of Telstra's commitment wasn't clear.

A Telstra spokesentity told Vulture South the carrier is “using vCloud Air for some internal workloads.” Gelsinger also said “Our relationship with Telstra is off to a good start”, so watch this space.

There's a long way to go in this story, however, as Telstra has also signed a deal with SoftLayer, is known to be a user of Odin's (formerly Parallels') platform for offering virtual servers for hire and is also Cisco InterCloud partner. But Telstra's not on the record as a consumer of those services as well as vendor, suggesting its hybrid cloud strategy may be relying on VMware. ®