While some competitors opt to announce their cloud expansions 15 data centers at a time, VMware Inc. is taking a much more reserved approach to scaling its infrastructure footprint, sticking to one facility per press release. The company has been accelerating its expansion efforts over the last few months, though, as competitors have picked up the pace.

The latest location where VMware has chosen to set up shop is the London suburb of Chessington, which is about 19 miles west of its UK headquarters in Camberley.  The site is also a short drive from one of the new locations IBM chose for its $1.2 billion build-out of data centers for its SoftLayer subsidiary.

VMware didn’t provide any details about the new Chessington facility other than to say that the expansion supports growing demand for its vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS). The infrastructure-as-a-service platform was introduced last September during the company’s annual customer conference.

VMware built vCHS to exploit its strongest competitive asset, which is its dominant share of the virtualization market.  The platform offers full interoperability with existing deployments of its widely-used hypervisor right out of the box, according to the company, thereby eliminating the need for customers to worry about compatibility issues between on- and off-premise environments.

Since launch, the EMC subsidiary has taken major steps to further augment the platform, adding a competitively-priced virtual desktop service in March and following that up a month later with a managed disaster recovery offering that targets one of the last remaining holes in Amazon’s cloud portfolio. In fact, Microsoft is the only one of the top providers to have even come close to matching the functionality of the solution, and its response is still very much in the works.

Laying claim to international territories

The announcement  of the new Chessington data center comes nine months after vCHS first arrived in Europe with the opening of a VMware facility in Slough to the north west. And it follows hot on the heels of VMware expanding to Japan through an alliance with the IT reseller arm of long-time partner SoftBank Telecom Corporation.

The purpose of establishing a physical presence in key markets is twofold. One is to reduce latency, which has been identified as the main barrier to hybrid cloud adoption by  the head of Morgan Stanley’s data center operations. The other is regulatory compliance. A sizable portion of data managed by enterprises and government agencies is not allowed to leave its home jurisdiction by law, which means that organizations must have an option to store information locally in order to use cloud services. VMware is addressing both requirements with the build-out.

Photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc