New Dell Technologies-VMware Integrations Raise the Bar

New Dell Technologies-VMware integrations for HCI, cloud, storage and data protection, announced Tuesday, confirm the tight alliance between companies. This is amid speculation of a potential VMware spinoff.

The latest Dell Technologies product releases for the VMware environment coincide with this week’s VMworld 2020 (virtual). The product updates fall into three buckets: cloud updates, support for VMware Tanzu, and storage and data protection for VMware.

Dell Technologies’ Varun Chhabra

“Collaboration between Dell Technologies and VMware continues to be very strong,” said Varun Chhabra, vice president, cloud and edge, at Dell Technologies. “As you look at the entire portfolio at Dell Technologies, starting with servers, HCI, networking, storage, data protection and going on to the cloud business as well, we continue to invest in joint engineering with VMware. This is to create products that help our customers take advantage of VMware products in the best way possible.”

Next Generation

Beginning with cloud, Dell Technologies announced two enhancements. These include VMware Cloud on Dell EMC 4^th generation and VMware Cloud Director on DTCP (Dell Technology Cloud Platform).

What’s new in VMware Cloud on Dell EMC are enhancements in regulatory compliance and certifications, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid verification, new nodes for advanced and data intensive workloads, multiple clusters per rack to isolate resources, and HCX-based workload migration.

Regarding the new compliance certifications, they include global and vertical industry-specific certifications such as ISO, CCPA, EU GDPR and SOC-2.

“The goal here is to make sure that customers can use the platform and rest assured that they’re meeting the compliance needs for their industry or their geography,” said Chhabra.

The second enhancement targets cloud service providers (CSPs). VMware Cloud Director for DTCP makes it easier and faster for CSPs to build and scale hosted cloud environments through this new integration. VMware Cloud Director now integrates and is certified on the DTCP.

“We see tremendous interest from our customers to leverage cloud service provider environments. So this helps them and CSPs provide a consistent experience between what customers are running on-premises and in the cloud service provider environment,” said Chhabra.

Tanzu

The Dell Technologies Tanzu updates include extended support of VMware technologies across the Dell Technologies infrastructure portfolio with tightly integrated solutions for Dell Technologies Cloud, Dell EMC VxRail, Dell EMC PowerProtect and Dell EMC PowerEdge. These updates align with the latest releases of vSphere, vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation to support Tanzu.

“Dell Technologies is all in when it comes to helping our joint customers deploy Tanzu easily,” said Jon Siegal, vice president, integrated products and solutions, at Dell Technologies.

HCI options for Tanzu include Tanzu Architecture for VxRail, vSphere with Tanzu on VxRail, and VCF with Tanzu on VxRail (DTCP). These options give customers choice in deploying VMware Tanzu whether through a validated architecture, VxRail cluster and/or the DTCP.

Tanzu Architecture for VxRail is available today. vSphere with Tanzu on VxRail and VCF with Tanzu on VxRail (DTCP) will be available in October.

VMWare launched Tanzu at VMworld in 2019. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, a data-center-as-a-service offering, has been available for about one year.

Storage Support

Here’s a closer look at Dell Technologies storage and data protection updates around Tanzu.

Dell Technologies storage platforms support the VMware Tanzu. Dell EMC PowerMax replication now integrates with VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) and VMware Site Recovery Manager. This simplifies management and improves access to mission-critical applications. The new Cloud Mobility for Dell EMC PowerMax feature helps move data from on-premises to public clouds.

In preview only, Dell EMC Object Scale is the next generation, Kubernetes-based object storage platform. Object Scale allows developers to …

… provision S3-compatible, cloud-scale storage for modern stateful applications on demand.

Designed with a scale-out, geo-distributed architecture with global accessibility, Object Scale delivers enterprise storage across edge, core and hybrid cloud environments, according to the company.

“We’ve been in the object storage space for quite a long time. But what we see coming is that object is less a storage platform in the future and more of a feature,” said Caitlin Gordon, vice president, storage and data protection at Dell Technologies. And, Object Scale is our effort to support this.”

Dell Technologies Object Scale is a fully software-defined, container-based, object storage platform. It’s the next evolution in Object Storage.

Dell Technologies’ Caitlin Gordon

“With this release, it is deployable on VMware and it’s built on our industry leading object software-defined software,” said Gordon. “You get scalability, its multicloud ready and developer-friendly.”

Data Protection

Data protection for Tanzu includes protection for Tanzu on premises and in the cloud. And, the company offers a range of life cycle services for Tanzu support. The vendor’s PowerProtect Data Manager has several integrations coming in the next release.

One integration is that PowerProtect Data Manager will protect the VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure layers. PowerProtect, with the storage policy-based management capability, is another integration.

“So, a VM admin can create a storage policy, including the data protection schemes, and every time that storage policy is applied, the data protection policy is also applied. It’s all automatically automated through PowerProtect Data Manager,” said Gordon.

Dell Technologies and VMware are working on technology to enable PowerProtect Data Manager for mission-critical VM protection.

“This is about taking those large mission critical VMs and instead of just replicating them for protection, you can still create a secondary copy, back it up but without disruption. That’s because of the intelligent way we’re able to integrate with vSphere and be able to protect those VMs with PowerProtect Data Manager,” Gordon explained.

This technology is not yet available.

Project Monterey

Project Monterey is a technology preview to redefine the next-generation architecture to support the next generation of modern applications.

“While Tanzu focuses on the applications, think of Monterey as focused on the infrastructure,” said Siegal.

Dell Technologies is closely aligned with VMware on Project Monterey, which is being unveiled this week at VMworld. Dell Technologies is a key go-to-market partner. This pertains to delivering integrated, automated solutions using SmartNICs from a broad set of vendors.

Infrastructure for modern data-centric applications that are distributed, and multicloud, will consume more CPU cycles for critical application performance. That’s where hardware accelerators such as SmartNICs come in.

SmartNICs are a new generation of intelligent Network Interface Cards (NICs). They will play a role in the future of compute platforms for data centers, edge and telco 5G environments.

“We will be delivering a broad set of solutions on our HCI, server, and storage platforms within the next year,” said Siegal.