Dell-Snowflake Form ‘Industry-First’ Cloud, Storage Partnership

Dell Technologies unveils a new product integration and go-to-market partnership with Snowflake which combines Dell’s storage systems with Snowflake’s cloud data technology.

Dell Technologies is forming an “industry-first” partnership with cloud data superstar Snowflake, combining Dell’s on-premise storage systems with Snowflake’s cloud data technology to give customers greater flexibility operating in multi-cloud environments, meeting data sovereignty requirements and more easily turn data into insights.

The two companies will connect data from Dell’s market-leading enterprise storage portfolio with the Snowflake Data Cloud, the company’s cloud data analytics offering which allows customers to mobilize their data. Customers have the ability to copy on-premise object data from Dell hardware to Snowflake.

Additionally, Dell and Snowflake will pursue product integrations and joint go-to-market efforts in the second half of 2022, showing both companies commitment to grow market share together.

“Dell and Snowflake are clearly market leaders in the in the data space and these types of powerful relationships tend to bode really well for customers,” said Stephen Ayoub, president of Ahead, a Chicago-based channel all-star who is a top Dell and Snowflake partner. “Any time that leading technology vendors work together to provide an end-to-end solution and give customers a reference architecture—the customer wins at the end of the day.”

[Related: Dell Technologies World 2022 coverage]

The Dell and Snowflake collaboration agreement was unveiled today at Dell Technologies World 2022 in Las Vegas.

Although no official joint solutions are available yet, Dell and Snowflake customers will soon be able to use on-premises data stored on Dell object storage products with the Snowflake Data Cloud, while keeping their data local or seamlessly copying it to public clouds.

Dell-Snowflake Technical Details

The new partnership will leverage Dell EMC’s object storage platform ECS, which provides scalability, performance and resiliency to drive insights from wherever data resides. Dell’s other storage platform being leveraged in the Snowflake partnership is Dell EMC ObjectScale, which delivers a software-defined microservices-based architecture using Kubernetes.

Customers use Snowflake’s Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and securely share data, and execute diverse analytic workloads in the cloud.

With the “industry- first” collaboration between on-premise storage systems and the Snowflake Data Cloud, Dell is able to expand its SaaS provider ecosystem for data insights on-premises and in public clouds, said Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management for Dell Technologies.

“This is all about enabling our customers to keep data and place data in their applications in the correct place, but still be able to use the Snowflake data analytics platform against that data,” Gordon told CRN.

“Customers want to keep some of the data in their data center, but they still want to use that with Snowflake’s cloud-based analytics,” Gordan said. “By not changing where the analytics run but keeping the data in place, we’ve been able to collaborate to enable Snowflake’s external table capability to actually read the data that exists on our on-premise object storage capabilities—which is either ECS or ObjectScale—so that you can actually read that data, keep it in place, but leverage that with other cloud-based data that you have in the Snowflake platform.”

Dell said the new offerings will help customers have increased flexibility and choices of where data resides, but not have to compromise on the data analytics platform they want to use.

The collaboration will allow organizations to gain more value from their on-premises data while leveraging Snowflake’s platform and the capabilities of the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Dell Doubling Down On Cloud Partnership

“A huge part of what we’re doing here at Dell, in addition to building our own software and services, is broadening our ecosystem of partners. That includes the hyperscalers, that includes data center providers, and now we’re going to be [partnering] with SaaS providers as well—Snowflake being the first one,” said Dell’s Gordon.

At Dell Technologies World today, Dell unveiled new offerings with public cloud giants Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Dell launched its new CyberSense for Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS offering, as well as a Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Microsoft Azure solution, today at Dell Technologies World.

Ahead’s Ayoub said Dell is making the correct moves in forming new partnerships with the important market players.

“Dell is showing their commitment to integration with other applications and the hyperscalers. Snowflake is a good example of that being a very relevant cloud data analytics company,” said Ayoub.

Ayoub said Dell march to boost innovation with leading application and cloud vendors is a win for channel partners. “It gives customer flexibility for a true hybrid solution,” he said.