Dell EMC-IBM Partnership Promotes Hybrid Cloud Adoption

VMWORLD BARCELONA — Building on a strategic partnership to accelerate enterprise hybrid cloud adoption between IBM and VMware announced in more than a year ago, Dell EMC and IBM on Tuesday jointly announced an agreement that provides Dell EMC commercial customers access to VMware solutions on IBM Cloud. IBM also added Dell EMC infrastructure products into the IBM Cloud and is expanding access to VMware solutions. The announcement was made at VMWorld Barcelona.

Dell EMC will begin offering VMware vCenter Server on the IBM Cloud to customers, which enables them to extend on-premises data-center capability to the public cloud, while preserving existing investments in VMware tooling, scripts and training, the company said.

Dell EMC’s Armughan Ahmad

“Dell EMC is laser-focused on helping customers quickly and successfully embrace their digital transformations. Dell EMC and IBM realize many customers will approach the challenge differently, but all are interested in realizing the benefits of cloud-like efficiencies. Our relationship with IBM allows Dell’s commercial customers the ability to quickly and easily extend their VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud,” said Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions, Dell EMC. “Customers will now be able to easily migrate enterprise applications to the single-tenant, IBM-hosted environment, and maintain the same level of control and visibility as if it were part of their own data center,” he added.

Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business at VMware, noted that through the resale of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Dell EMC can offer commercial customers a hybrid-cloud choice with VMware offerings as a service as they make the cloud transition.

Dell EMC customers can opt to have their VMware environments on premises or in the IBM Cloud — plus access to IBM’s cloud-native services, including cognitive and analytics. Dell EMC customers are still able to manage cloud workloads using VMware-compatible tools while maintaining control with full administration access to the VMware ESXi hosts.

Dell EMC will begin reselling VMware solutions on IBM Cloud in the fourth quarter.

The IBM-VMware partnership that kicked off last September included a jointly designed architecture and cloud offering that will enable customers to automatically provision pre-configured VMware SDDC environments, consisting of VMware vSphere, NSX and Virtual SAN on the IBM Cloud. With this SDDC environment in place, customers will be able to deploy workloads in this hybrid-cloud environment without modification, due to common security and networking models based on VMware, IBM noted.

In August 2016, IBM signed on as the first vCloud Air Network partner to deliver the VMware Cloud Foundation as a service.