Dell’s VxRail With VMware Tanzu Gives Partners ‘Seat At The Table’

‘Dell Technologies is the only HCI vendor offering a fully integrated Tanzu portfolio with reference architecture, cluster, and private cloud offerings -- all on VxRail,’ says Dell Technologies Chad Dunn.

Dell Technologies’ world-leading hyperconverged infrastructure solution, VxRail, is being taken up a notch with the injection of Kubernetes via VMware Tanzu.

VxRail’s new VMware Tanzu integration allows customers to build, run and manage Kubernetes container-based applications in a fully integrated hyperconverged infrastructure solution.

“Dell Technologies is the only HCI vendor offering a fully integrated Tanzu portfolio with reference architecture, cluster, and private cloud offerings -- all on VxRail,” said Chad Dunn, Dell Technologies vice president of product management for VxRail, in a blog post on Tuesday.

[Related: Dell To Make ‘All Offerings’ As-A-Service, Says Michael Dell]

Rick Gouin, chief technology officer at Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based Dell Titanium partner and 2019 CRN Triple Crown award winner, said the new VxRail capabilities with VMware Tanzu will help drive net new sales.

“This allows us to provide an engineered solution to our customers which takes the guesswork out of a new stack deployment,” said Gouin. “Having Dell and VMware behind a validated architecture increases customer confidence in a strategy to containerize their applications. Being able to quickly deploy the entire stack makes this transition feel like a more manageable effort.”

Dell is in lockstep with VMware in terms of support for the latest VMware Kubernetes upgrades. With VxRail automated full stack lifecycle management and non-disruptive addition of next generation platforms, customers can continuously take advantage of Kubernetes upgrades on the integrated infrastructure.

“Integrating lifecycle management is the real win here,” Gouin said. “Sounds like they are doing it right by committing to a window to stay in sync.”

With the launch of VMware Tanzu on VxRail, customers can choose the infrastructure to fit their organizations operating model and level of Kubernetes expertise.

Dell’s Dunn said Dell has it all -- whether customers are looking to develop on a validated Platform-as-a-Service or Container-as-a-Service platformwith Tanzu Architecture for VxRail; rapidly get started with a Kubernetes deployment of vSphere with Tanzu on VxRail; or deploy Kubernetes at scale on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform with VMware Cloud Foundation and now Tanzu.

VMware Tanzu on VxRail provides a cloud-like source pooling, elasticity and programmability to accelerate Kubernetes infrastructure delivery so developers can keep up with the pace of digital transformation.

In a recent interview with CRN, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell said the joint engineering strategy between Dell and VMware around hyperconverged infrastructure has been a huge success for both companies.

“We’re seeing substantial growth rates and continuing adoption of VxRail. I think because it’s the easy button to hybrid cloud. As I talk to customers, that’s certainly the overwhelming theme—they want hybrid cloud and multi-cloud,” said Dell. “What we’ve also done is we put VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in VxRail and of course that makes it super easy for customers to have consistent operations and infrastructure no matter where they decide to run their workloads. All of that has been very well received by customers. Clearly, Dell Technologies continues to be the industry leader in HCI [hyperconverged infrastructure] no matter how you count it.”

Dell said the technology integrations between the two companies is full stream ahead.

“We’re going to continue to enhance [VMware integration] with new edge offerings and new footprints as customers require a wide range of solutions from rugged edge solutions to scaling up their core data centers and beyond,” said Dell.

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell is the worldwide market leader in hyperconverged infrastructure, owning more than 33 percent of the global market. Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware is the global leader in HCI software, owning 42 percent of the worldwide hyperconverged software market.

On Tuesday, VMware also unveiled a slew of new software innovation and upgrades to vSAN, vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), including remote cluster management that will enable VxRail customers to extend VCF workload domains to remote locations.

Winslow’s Gouin said VMware Tanzu on VxRail opens the door for partners to chase new customers.

“This offering adds breadth to our portfolio and allows us to get involved in conversations where we might not have otherwise had a seat at the table,” he said.