Dell EMC announces enhancements to Cloud-enabled Platforms, Infrastructure, Solutions and Services

Dell EMC has announced several enhancements to its cloud-enabled infrastructure solutions portfolio to help customers maximize the value of their IT ecosystem and multi-cloud environments. Coupled with innovation from across Dell Technologies, Dell EMC is delivering a broad portfolio of cloud solutions that caters to all types of applications and creates a consistent experience across cloud platforms.

The increasing amount of data brought about by mobility, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, along with traditional workloads, is driving demand for all types of clouds, including public, managed and on-premises. In a survey conducted by Forrester, commissioned by Pivotal, a Dell Technologies business, and Microsoft, 100% of respondents are using multiple cloud infrastructure and/or cloud application platforms. Additionally, 99% believe a consistent, unified approach to deployment, operation and use of combined Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service platforms enables better IT service to business. Cloud decision-makers in this study also said they look for integrated PaaS and IaaS with consistent identity and access controls, development experience, runtime environments and migration services.

Sam Grocott, Senior Vice-President, Dell EMC, says, “As more applications and traditional workloads move into various clouds, the proliferates, one of cloud siloes will become inevitable, inhibiting organizations’ ability to fully exploit business differentiators like data analytics and burgeoning AI initiatives. Dell EMC’s focused innovation across its cloud-enabled portfolio of platforms, infrastructure, and consumption models and services helps organizations evolve more quickly to a cloud operating model for the modern data center.”

Dell EMC offers best-of-breed, pre-engineered solutions to provide a variety of multi-cloud platforms and reference architectures. This includes IaaS with VMware for traditional applications; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture and containers with Pivotal for cloud-native applications; an enterprise-class public cloud platform with Virtustream; and, Azure services on-premises with Microsoft Azure Stack. With hardware, software integration, tooling and documentation combined, organizations can accelerate time to results, simplify daily operations and achieve greater levels of efficiency and transparency.

Right now, Dell EMC and VMware are simplifying and accelerating paths to the software-defined data center (SDDC) and multi-cloud with Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack SDDC hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. VxRack SDDC, pre-integrated and constructed to deliver the latest technology from VMware Cloud Foundation, offers the ultimate infrastructure foundation for realizing a VMware multi-cloud. With new capabilities to match the needs of customers’ own workloads, VxRack SDDC features the VMware SDDC software suite pre-integrated on a wide range of VxRail hardware. It also features automation and serviceability extensions in SDDC Manager, with extensibility to a choice of public cloud providers.

With Dell EMC VxRail as a pre-engineered and pre-validated IaaS platform and infrastructure foundation for PaaS, customers can more easily and quickly architect, implement and operate a complete SDDC, including VMware NSX and the VMware vRealize Suite, with less risk. New options of the VMware Validated Designs for VxRail now support distributed multi-availability zones architecture and multi-site deployments with disaster recovery. This enables customers to further reduce risk and simplify operations and maintenance with a validated, standardized SDDC design based on VMware’s best practices.

Additionally, VMware Cloud Assembly, the new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based cloud management solution component of VMware Cloud Services, will feature unique integration with VxRail to speed time-to-value. Once generally available, Dell EMC VxRail will have a synchronized release and be the first and only HCI appliance jointly developed to provide integrations that seamlessly work with VMware Cloud Services.

To support customers’ IT and cloud operations consistently across on and off-premises cloud models, Dell EMC provides the following capabilities –

· Cloud Data Mobility enables organizations to move data to and from cloud storage seamlessly, providing the flexibility to augment on-premises data storage with cloud-based storage. Updates to the Data Domain Cloud Tier for long-term retention help further reduce transactional overhead by increasing the object size written to the cloud. Dell EMC also has improved data storage utilization by way of tight integration with Virtustream Storage Cloud and Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage.

· Cloud Data Protection protects data residing on various cloud platforms. Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR has been enhanced for application-consistent cloud disaster recovery in AWS, as well as recovery to VMware Cloud on AWS. Dell EMC Cloud Snapshot Manager provides backup and recovery for public cloud workloads, and now offers protection for Microsoft Azure. VMware vCloud Director features a new data protection extension that now enables cloud service providers to offer an integrated VMware and Data Protection self-service solution to customers. Additionally, Dell EMC Data Protection Suite was named an Advanced Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network and a Microsoft Partner Gold Competency in Cloud Platforms.

· Cloud Control allows environments to be managed from anywhere. Powered by machine learning, CloudIQ, a free cloud-based application that allows users to proactively track storage health, predict capacity shortages and detect performance anomalies, is now introducing support for PowerMax, VMAX, and XtremIO. This support is in addition to Dell EMC Unity and SC Series. New VMware integration provides virtual machine-level performance and capacity insights, and new mobile apps provide access to CloudIQ from anywhere.

· Cloud Data Services – features comprehensive data services spanning all file types for applications running in the cloud, including Isilon Cloud for Google Cloud Platform, Elastic Cloud Storage and Virtustream Storage Cloud. Unity Cloud Edition is the latest addition to this family, offering a fully-featured software-defined unified storage deployed in the cloud. These capabilities enable users to easily deploy Dell EMC unity block and file storage with VMware Cloud on AWS. Additionally, users can leverage the flexibility of cloud deployment to support disaster recovery and as-needed operational demands, including test and development, and data analytics.

With flexible cloud consumption solutions through Dell Financial Services (DFS), Dell EMC makes it easy for customers to acquire cloud-enabled infrastructure and achieve transformational goals. For example, customers may choose to leverage cost and flexibility benefits of consumption solutions to accommodate unpredictable usage of new applications and seasonal spikes that drive buffer capacity requirements.

Cloud Flex for HCI minimizes the risk of moving to Dell EMC VxRail Appliances or Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack. It requires no upfront investment and has declining payments over time with no obligation after the first 12 months. Dell EMC also offers Ready Capacity, which provides on-demand storage and buffer capacity that scales to match usage needs, and Flex on Demand, which allows customers to deploy base capacity now and pay for buffer capacity as it is used. With the flexibility to consume only what is needed as an operating expense, customers can improve efficiency and reallocate resources to innovation.

To help customers more quickly realize the value of multi-cloud environments, Dell EMC also offers a wide range of expert cloud consulting and technology services. Dell EMC Services consultants help customers create roadmaps, profile applications, implement cloud management and automation platforms and transition to a cloud operating model. Experts are available to help deploy, transition to, and optimize cloud technologies and provide comprehensive hardware and software support 24x7 to help ensure optimal system performance and minimize downtime.

The new Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace brings the power of the Dell Technologies family together in one place. The marketplace offers customers a choice of cloud platforms, enhanced cloud-enabled infrastructure capabilities, as well as consulting and technology services, and consumption models in a self-service portal.