At this past VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas VMware announced their new vFabric Data Director. vFabric Data Director is a platform that’s intended to allow enterprise databases to function as a cloud service. In his VMworld 2011 keynote Paul Martiz, CEO of VMware, referred to this as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). vFabric Data Director is designed to allow administrators to securely automate and delegate routine administrative tasks making the database more self-service. These tasks include database provisioning, backup, and cloning.
Currently the vFabric Data Director only supports a customized version of PostgresSQL that VMware created called VMware vFabric Postgres. However, VMware has published their standard for the service. At this point neither SQL Server or Oracle support the new vFabric Data Director service.
You can find out more about vFabric Data Director at:
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vfabric-data-director/
