Dell Technologies Rolls Out Advancements for Kubernetes, Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

VMWARE VMWORLD — Dell Technologies on Monday unveiled new advancements and options designed to allow organizations to benefit from Dell Technologies Cloud for both traditional applications and cloud-native environments.

The announcement was made at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco. Varun Chhabra, vice president of product marketing for the Dell Technologies Cloud platform, tells us Dell has always been a partner-centric company and “everything we do is with the partner in mind.”

Dell Technologies’ Varun Chhabra

“The channel and the partner ecosystem have been a huge part of our business and what we’re looking to do here is provide more and more value-added services for our channel, for our partners, that align with what our customers are really asking us for,” he said. “What’s new here is we’re doing this together with our ecosystem to really go help our customers with their multicloud challenges and really help them deliver a consistent hybrid cloud infrastructure that our joint customers can then take advantage of across their data center, public cloud, as well as at the edge.”

Dell Technologies Cloud platforms now support VMware PKS, a Kubernetes-as-a-service offering available through the VMware Cloud, so organizations can deploy, run and manage Kubernetes for production workloads alongside traditional applications. This helps organizations to more quickly adopt flexible and secure cloud-native approaches, according to Dell.

“Where the channel and partners in general can play a role here is … it enables them to be a trusted adviser to be able to support one of the really big initiatives for a lot of our customers, which is essentially cloud-native applications,” Chhabra said. “It’s something we see in every single conversation and I’m sure most of our channel does as well. And what a lot of channel partners are telling us is they’re being asked to provide infrastructure that’s ready for cloud-native applications. Because this allows for really easy deployment of the cloud-native infrastructure, this can really help our channel partners provide that updated, consolidated service to our joint customers.”

In addition, Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs now are available to help organizations build Dell cloud environments using Dell EMC servers, storage and networking.

Dell Technologies Cloud’s data center-as-a-service offering, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, also is now available, and Dell Technologies Cloud platforms now are available with pay-for-what-you-use flexible consumption models.

“Most channel partners I’m talking to are really looking to go up the stack and provide value-added services beyond just the sale of infrastructure, so certainly in this case, providing an infrastructure that’s ready for app development is only the start,” Chhabra said. “There are so many opportunities that channel partners have, just like they do with other infrastructure solutions they sell with us, to help manage the solution, to provide value-added services like disaster recovery data protection … on top of this infrastructure. We believe there’s a huge, huge opportunity for our channel partners to basically create and add value on top of what we’re providing as an offer to them to our customers.”

“Building on our deep roots in the data center, we have invested heavily in cloud, enabling us to build solutions that span these two worlds,” said Scott Miller, WWT‘s senior director of strategic partnerships. “With new Kubernetes capabilities from Dell Technologies Cloud, WWT can offer an industry-leading, purpose-built container solution to operationalize Kubernetes while minimizing cloud life cycle management for enterprises moving to hybrid cloud models.”