The VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is now available in Europe, following the company's opening of a data centre in Slough, UK to service the needs of customers in the region.

The data centre is compliant with UK and EU privacy and data sovereignty demands. It is fully-redundant and offers flash-accelerated disk storage, 10G networking and congestion control, as well as load balancers, firewalls and VPNs using virtual networks, switches and routers.

"VMware vCloud Hybrid Service solves key business issues allowing organizations to seamlessly extend their data centers to the cloud-- linking both private and public cloud together to create a truly hybrid cloud," the company claims.

Enterprises are increasingly moving services, applications and infrastructure to cloud-based architecture, IHS reports-- and as a result cloud revenues from the segment are to surge by a factor of three from 2011 to 2017.

According to the analyst 2014 enterprise cloud spending should total $174.2 billion (a 20% increase over $145.2bn in 2013) before growing to $235.1bn by 2017, triple the $79.2bn from 2011.

“With the cloud touching nearly every consumer and enterprise around the globe, spending for cloud-related storage, servers, applications and content will be dedicated toward building a framework that is rapidly scalable, highly dynamic, available on-demand and requiring minimal management,” IHS says. “The robust growth will come as an increasing number of large and small enterprises move more of their applications to the cloud, while also looking at data analytics to drive new insights into consumer behavior.”

Enterprise Chromebook users can access Windows applications more easily following a Google-VMware partnership bringing Horizon Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) to the cloud-powered operating system.

According to Vmware customers will be able to access Windows applications, apps and desktops via web-based application catalog. ChromeOS users can already remotely access Windows machines via Google Remote Desktop app (as well as a number of 3rd party solutions), but VMware promises the addition of enterprise-class security features.

Powering all is VMware's Blast HTML5 technology.

Intel launches the Xeon E5-2600 v2 processor family aimed at high performance computing, cloud and enterprise applications-- and with it comes an era of cloud providers sticking "Powered by Intel Cloud Technology" on their websites.

The Intel branding exercise has Amazon Web Services, Virtustream, Rackspace, CenturyLink-Savvis, Canopy, Cloud4com and OVH, among others, marking Intel-powered instances as such.

"Use of the recognizable logo will communicate the performance, quality, and security benefits available to end customers," an Intel press release states. No doubt Chipzilla fears custom-built ARM-based alternatives taking over its traditional datacentre stomping ground...