NEW YORK, USA: At the annual VMWorld conference in San Francisco, the titular company laid out its vision for "IT as a Service," a conceptual shift that would move IT departments to providing efficiency and availability for data and compute power, and put the cloud at the core of corporate computing platforms.

The products rolled out include: VMware vCloud Director, which enables IT departments to create "virtual data centers;" VMware vShield, a security system for virtualized and cloud computing environments, and VMware vCloud Datacenter Services, which creates "hybrid clouds" that give companies the ability to use both private, internal cloud computing systems and secure external clouds as needed.

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In a blog post at Enterprise IT Planet's green blog, T. Lau writes:

vCloud Director allows companies to determine on the fly whether a computing resource should be located locally or in the cloud. The software creates "Virtual Data Centers" -- local pools of compute, network and storage resources with defined management policies, service level agreements, and pricing.

vCloud Director, if it turns out to be what VMware says it is, isn't just a game changer. It's a game starter for Green IT.