Dell Technologies made a series of VMware related announcements on Day One of VMworld, which also included the first two Cloud Validated designs between the two companies, and the availability of a flexible consumption model. Initial availability for the Data Centre-as-a-Service offering announced earlier was also announced, but it’s not yet in Canada.
VMware Pat Gelsinger and Dell’s Jeff Clarke at the original announcement of Dell Technologies Cloud at Dell Technologies World
Today, on the first day of VMworld, Dell Technologies made several announcements relating to their partnership with VMware. The focus was specifically around the Dell Technologies Cloud, and the most anticipated is likely to be support for VMware PKS on Dell EMC VxRail, which lets organizations deploy, run, and manage Kubernetes alongside traditional applications. Initial availability for the Dell Technologies Cloud’s fully managed Data Center-as-a-Service offering was also announced. In addition, Dell also announced Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs. Two are available now, with more promised. The availability of flexible consumption models that lets customers pay for what they use was also made public.
“Our alignment and partnership with Dell and VMware have never been better,” said Sam Grocott, SVP Infrastructure Solutions Group Marketing, Dell EMC.
A highlight at Dell Technologies World in late April was the announcement of the Dell Technologies Cloud. It’s a set of cloud infrastructure solutions that leverages VMware software and Dell EMC hardware, to make hybrid cloud environments simpler to deploy and manage.
“Depending on the needs of an application, there are different options available to drive them around workload specific decisions, and this is driving cloud proliferation,” said Varun Chhrabra, Vice President, Product Marketing, Dell EMC Cloud Platform. “The majority of our customers have apps on five or more clouds – all of which are different. This leads to siloes in an organization, and moving workloads across these clouds is a challenge.”
“To solve this challenge, at Dell Technologies World, we announced Dell Technologies Cloud,” Chhrabra said. “It provides one cloud experience in public, private and edge clouds.” It combines Dell EMC systems, and VMware Cloud Foundation, as well as over 4200 cloud partners, including AWS, Azure and Google.” The addition of the Google Cloud Platform support has now been formally announced.
The addition of the Kubernetes support will support few, given that it was a big ask in several forums at Dell Technologies World.
“Customers have asked for new capabilities – things they wanted to see on our roadmap – and support for Kubernetes was key here,” Chhrabra stated. “Customers want greater infrastructure flexibility, including the ability to meet demand with support for performance sensitive applications.
The VMware PKS integration is the product of joint engineering between VMware, Pivotal and Dell EMC is delivering with Dell Technologies Cloud.
“The support of VMware PKS provides automated Kubernetes development on Dell Tech Cloud platform,” Chhrabra said. Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms with VMware PKS on Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail has planned global availability in September 2019.
Two new Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs were unveiled, to provide additional infrastructure options for organizations building hybrid cloud environments. The validation is between Dell EMC and the VMware Cloud Foundation One is for Dell EMC PowerMax, and Dell EMC Unity storage arrays, and the other is for Dell EMC PowerEdge MX servers.
“With these, we are announcing a new way to build cloud infrastructure,” Chhrabra indicated. “These Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs come from working closed with VMware. We will add to those two validated designs over time.” The first two validated designs are available now.
At Dell Technologies World, the Dell Data Centre-as-a-service [DCaaS] offer was announced. Offered as VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, this provides a fully-managed hybrid cloud service for on-prem data centres and edge deployments
“We are now announcing that our DCaaS is now available in the market, starting with limited availability in the U.S.,” Chhrabra said. Global availability, including Canada, has not yet been set.
“New flexible consumption options for the Dell Technologies Cloud are now available with Flex on Demand,” Chhrabra said. “This improves ability to handle bursts and spikes and avoid overprovisioning infrastructure, while letting customers paid only for the capacity that they use.”
While the cloud was the focus, several other VMware announcements were also made.
“VXRail continues to grow like a rocket ship within the portfolio,” Grocott said. “We are announcing VXRail updates, which will see it be up to 20 per cent faster, with support for the new Nvidia GPU and the new Intel chipset. In data protection, we are working with VMware on Velero, protecting Kubernetes workloads.”
