Telefónica Business Solutions tunes up virtual data center beta cloud service

Telefónica Business Solutions is showing off the latest evolution of its virtualized data center at VMworld Europe this week.

Telefónica Business Solutions is working with VMware, Intel and Dell EMC on its Virtual Data Center (VDC) 4.0 beta cloud service, which includes new features such as Kubernetes-as-a-service, deep-learning AI, and self-managed MPLS VPNs.

Businesses are becoming more data-centric as they move to the cloud. By virtualizing the data center infrastructure in a hybrid cloud, Telefónica Business Solutions is able to interconnect all of its VDC nodes in order to deliver services to its multinational customers.

The latest version of VDC is currently available in Argentina, Brazil, Chili, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Telefónica's home country of Spain, and the U.S.

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The VDC service runs on the VMware Cloud Provider Platform, which lets Telefónica Business Solutions customers create virtual infrastructures by combining compute references, storage and advanced networking for services such as software-defined LAN, internet connectivity, MPLS VPNs and SD-WAN. It also allows multinational customers to blend those services with disaster recovery, security, data backup, and specific enterprise applications.

The Kubernetes-as-a-service is based on VMware Container Service Extension for vCloud Director, which is integrated into the VDC infrastructure. VMware announced the new Kubernetes-as-a-service platform in June. By putting Kubernetes into the cloud, VMware is seeking to reduce the complexities for businesses and service providers that want to use Kubernetes containers by offering a managed service for them.

The self-managed data backup and recovery elements are based on Dell EMC Data Protection for vCloud Director, while Intel is providing the AI and deep-learning capabilities based on the open source BigDL framework.

Also new for the 4.0 release is a global customer portal that enables resource management through the different VDC nodes.

Telefónica Business Solutions is a big customer win for VMware, which has been making a concerted effort to do more business in the service provider sector. In June, VMware announced the release of its vCloud NFV-OpenStack Edition 3.0 for 5G and multicloud networks.