Dell Technologies has introduced a hybrid cloud platform designed to help businesses deploy and manage VMware-based workloads seamlessly across multiple on- and off-premises cloud environments.
Called Dell Technologies Cloud, the new offering debuted at the 2019 Dell Technologies World user and partner conference, which is taking place this week in Las Vegas. Dell introduced a new cloud-based workspace solution at that show today as well.
An integrated combination of hardware, software, and services, Dell Technologies Cloud is built around two core components: Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms and an accompanying Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service offering.
The former is based on VMware’s Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud infrastructure and management solution and runs locally either on Dell’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure appliances or on conventional server, storage, and networking infrastructure. Users can integrate it as well with public clouds from Amazon Web Services or any of the more than 4,200 cloud partners in the VMware Service Provider Program. The total package is intended to serve as an operational hub for provisioning, governing, automating, and orchestrating physical and virtual workloads across multiple cloud infrastructures.
The new offering’s overarching mission is helping businesses with assets in multiple local and offsite clouds enjoy a more consistent, and therefore efficient, implementation and administration experience, according to Matt Baker, senior vice president of strategy and planning for Dell EMC, Dell’s backend infrastructure group. IDC research cited by Dell shows that more than 70 percent of companies use more than one cloud environment today. A separate study from VMware found that 83 percent of cloud adopters want consistent infrastructure and operations from the data center to the cloud.
“We believe that Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms really delivers on what our customers are looking for: a consistent operational environment that allows them to leverage the power of on-prem and off-prem investments to deliver a true hybrid cloud platform for the business,” Baker says.
Significantly, Baker adds, the new solution enables organizations to move workloads without modification among any of their onsite and offsite clouds. “A running VM or running container can be built and deployed seamlessly in any of those locations with no context switching,” he states.
Users can buy the new offering outright, rent it, or consume it as a service through Dell Financial Services.
The new Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service offering, which is also known as VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, combines VxRail hardware with associated software-defined data center technology that VMware introduced under the code name Project Dimension at last year’s U.S. VMworld conference in August. It’s designed to help organizations enjoy the same efficiencies and economics of a public cloud deployment on premises or at the edge of the network.
The solution is remotely managed on a heavily automated basis by Dell EMC, according to Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO for VMware’s cloud platform business unit. “Unlike a traditional managed service where you talk to humans [and] file tickets, this is a cloud service,” he says. “You’re requesting new hardware through it and we’re monitoring it and taking action on it.” The end result, he continues, is more time for pursuing strategic and differentiating IT projects.
Like Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC features pay-as-you-go pricing and bi-directional connectivity with public clouds, for application and data portability.
Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms are available globally now. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is currently in beta testing, with “limited customer availability” expected to come in the second half of the year.
The new workspace-as-a-service offering Dell announced today, called Dell Technologies Unified Workspace, matches Dell hardware with VMware’s Workspace ONE management platform to power cloud-based client environments.
The solution features managed security services from Dell’s Secureworks unit, as well as threat detection and response support through a partnership with CrowdStrike Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif. A forthcoming integration involving technologies from both of those companies plus Workspace ONE and Dell’s SafeBIOS off-host BIOS verification system will allow businesses to update endpoints out of compliance with BIOS requirements automatically.
Managed services from Dell’s ProManage program will draw on machine learning analysis of endpoint telemetry to optimize system performance and deliver proactive remediation of hardware and software problems.
“This is really a holistic, end-to-end intelligent platform that’s really designed to streamline and automate how our customers can manage and secure and support their overall end user computing environments and provide employees with real ready-to-work solutions out of the box,” says Courtney Burry, vice president of end user computing product marketing at VMware.
Users can run the new offering on non-Dell hardware and utilize security or management software from vendors other than Secureworks and VMware if they choose. “We recognize the world is heterogeneous,” says Brett Hansen, Dell’s vice president and general manager for client software and security solutions.
Unified Workspace seeks to help both end users and IT professionals address current challenges. On the user side, according to Hansen, those challenges revolve around the complexities of juggling laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones at multiple locations.
“There’s a lot of hassles,” Hansen notes. “You have to do a lot of troubleshooting. You’re certainly not in a world of flexibility where you can jump from device to device seamlessly and be able to access your applications and data no matter where you are.”
Administrators, meanwhile, must monitor and manage all of that hardware, not to mention the software running on it. “The number of devices that IT is managing is increasing, the number of operating systems is increasing, the amount of applications, the locations of those applications, the number of patches and updates, the number of secure security agents on the endpoints,” Hansen observes.
By allowing organizations to manage client environments centrally and run them on a wide range of devices, he continues, Unified Workspace aims to make technicians and end users alike more productive.
Both Dell Technologies Cloud and Unified Workspace, according to Baker, showcase the increasingly broad and sophisticated capabilities Dell has been offering since the completion of its merger with the former EMC Corp. in September 2016.
“We’re able to operate as we say from edge to core to cloud,” he says. “Increasingly we’re focusing our energy towards these end-to-end solutions.”
