Dell EMC Rolls Out Broad Swath of Cloud Enhancements

VMWARE VMWORLD — Dell EMC on Monday announced cloud-based enhancements that stretch across platforms, infrastructure, solutions and its services portfolio, addressing the reality of a multicloud world and the desire by enterprises to run workloads where they make sense.

In addressing the company’s cloud strategy, Dell EMC is responding to the 85 percent of businesses that report planning for workload mobility across clouds to meet varied business requirements, develop new products and services, test and develop endeavors prior to production deployment, and to meet regulatory requirements, according to Sam Grocott, marketing senior vice president, infrastructure solutions group (ISG), at Dell EMC.

Dell EMC’s Sam Grocott

Dell EMC made several announcements concerning its four cloud “pillars.”

The cloud-platform pillar consists of engineered, or turnkey, systems designed to run customer IaaS and cloud-native applications and span the on-premises and off-premises environment. New to this pillar are VxRail and VxRack SDDC, IaaS for traditional apps.

VxRail is a Dell EMC engineered cloud platform for current and future VMware Cloud technologies, flexible and customizable for IaaS or PaaS solutions. New are near-synchronous releases – less than 30 days – between VMware software and VxRail; expanded options, such as stretched clusters for multisite and multi-region deployments with disaster recovery to a VMware cloud; and Dell EMC networking fabric design center support for VxRail, to streamline network customization and configuration as the network becomes more strategic.

VxRack SDDC is Dell EMC’s turnkey, hyperconverged solution powered by VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). The vendor now supports VCF 2.3.2 – the latest release – alignment with VxRail hardware options such as the P, E and V series; VxRail models including the storage-dense S series; and increased configuration flexibility.

The next pillar, cloud-enabled infrastructure, really focuses on the data and the ability to store, manage and protect data in and across multiple clouds, said Grocott. What’s new today is the Data Domain Virtual Edition (DD VE) 4.0 — now for Microsoft Azure, scalable, software-defined protection storage running in the cloud.

The latest DD VE includes hypervisor support for KVM – totaling support for three hypervisors – and increased storage protection, now up to 96 TB. Existing offers in this pillar are Pivotal Ready Architecture, Azure Stack and Virtustream.

The Cloud Data Services pillar is designed to promote consistent operations for data services across Isilon Cloud for Google Cloud Platform, Virtustream Cloud Storage, ECS, CloudLink, and now, Dell EMC UnityVSA Cloud Edition, offering full-featured software-defined storage capabilities deployed in the cloud. The Dell EMC UnityVSA Cloud Edition features a unified storage capability with VMware Cloud on AWS; the ability to leverage Dell EMC U64 file services for VMC up to 256 TB; and software-defined storage for testing and development and disaster recovery.

The cloud control pillar provides predictive analytics, anomaly detection and proactive health checks for broad operational visibility. Today, the vendor announced enhancements to Dell EMC CloudIQ including expanded storage platform support for …

… up to five storage platforms, VMware integration for enhanced control, and around-the-clock proactive monitoring, including a mobile app for iPhone and Android.

Additional cloud offerings announced Monday include: Data Domain Cloud Tier with new AWS support; Data Domain Cloud DR, backup recovery in VMware Cloud; Cloud Snapshot Manager supporting Microsoft Azure snapshot management; a 50 percent increase in storage capacity and compute for Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS); and future-proofing with VxRail.

And finally, the vendor introduced the Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace for cloud infrastructure.

“It’s a one-stop shop where organizations can go to for all of their cloud needs. It’s really an informational portal for products and services as well as where you can buy products and services,” said Grocott.

The Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace is live today.