Dell Technologies Cloud: ‘The Best Hybrid Cloud Platform On Earth’

‘Dell and our channel partners now have a well-oiled hybrid cloud platform that can be used to help our customers achieve their cloud ambitions,’ says Matt Baker, senior vice president, Dell EMC Strategy and Planning in an interview with CRN.

Dell Technologies made a thunderous splash in hybrid cloud at its annual Dell Technologies World conference on Monday with the unveiling of its new Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms, dubbing it the best hybrid cloud solution on the planet.

“This is our opportunity to say, ‘Look, this is the best hybrid cloud platform on Earth,” said Matt Baker, senior vice president, Dell EMC Strategy and Planning in an interview with CRN, who played a significant role in crafting the new Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms. “We need to tell the world, ‘Look, this is the best way to build your hybrid cloud.’ Customers want a consistent operating environment. … Dell and our channel partners now have a well-oiled hybrid cloud platform that can be used to help our customers achieve their cloud ambitions.”

The new on-premise Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms is built on the company’s flagship hyper-converged infrastructure, VXRail, as well as VMware Cloud Foundation, which is VMware’s hybrid cloud solution that provides integrated cloud infrastructure and cloud management services to run applications in both private and public environments.

Dell has also validated designs that allow partners and customers to build Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms using traditional servers, networking and storage arrays inclusive to Dell EMC Unity and PowerMax. The cloud platforms are built to be flexible in order to meet a variety of workloads and performance needs, said Baker.

[Related: ‘Powerful’ VMware Cloud on Dell EMC Data Center-as-a-Service Launched]

A key ingredient for success in Dell’s new cloud push is how the $91 billion infrastructure giant is selling it, which includes through Dell Financial Services (DFS). The cloud platforms provide a slew of options of how customers can buy all the components inside the Dell Technologies Cloud including capex, opex, rent, lease, consume as-a-service or pay per usage.

With Dell Technologies Cloud, customers can consider one of three flexible consumption offerings though DFS including Flex on Demand – the company’s pay for what you use or metered option. Customers can choose their total deployed capacity and minimum usage commitment or scale usage up and down to match workloads.

Other ways customers can buy the Dell Technologies Cloud through DFS, is a pay-as-you-grow option which is a customized payment to support projected growth, flexible deployment schedules, deferrals and pre-provisioned upgrades.

Rick Gouin, chief technology officer at Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass.-based Dell Titanium partner and 2018 CRN Triple Crown Award winner, said many customers today don’t understand how to achieve a true hybrid cloud which is a problem Dell Technologies Cloud will solve.

“A customer moves his workload out to the public cloud, realizes it’s too expensive, has to move it back, finds workloads he can’t move – all of a sudden they have these two separate environments that aren’t unified. It’s like we recreated silos,” said Gouin. “With this new Dell cloud, they’re fixing a lot of the difficult obstacles as it related to hybrid cloud. For example, the opex pricing -- that’s one of the things we hear from customers is they want to be able to pay for on-premise equipment with opex models -- they’re hitting that with this. Also that ability to seamlessly move workloads between private and public – that’s one of the big stumbling blocks for people who want to implement hybrid solutions -- they’re addressing that. This is great news for us and our customers.”

Dell Technologies Cloud was jointly engineered with VMware, which is part of Dell Technologies, to be the simplest and fastest hybrid cloud to deploy in the market. The platform allows users to migrate workloads seamlessly between public and private cloud using familiar VMware tools.

“The VMware platform is a pervasive part of every IT shop on Earth. They might not run everything on it today, but in most cases the largest operational surface area is a VMware virtualized environment moving towards a VMware-based container environment,” said Baker. “This allows partners to take and leverage all of that knowledge and project it forward to something that they have been struggling with, which is, ‘How do I build a cloud environment that doesn’t create a bunch of new operational silos?’ The Dell Technologies Cloud puts our customers at the center of their hybrid cloud operating environment. It does that with a toolset that’s familiar, with automation tools that are familiar, and just a built-up amount of knowledge [of VMware] that allows them to leverage this today.”

It is also key to note that the family of businesses under the $91 billion Dell Technologies umbrella isn’t only Dell EMC and VMware, but includes RSA, SecureWorks, Boomi, VirtuStream and Pivotal. The new cloud platform can include some solutions from other Dell Technologies technology such as Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Pivotal Container Service.

“Layering on top of this Dell Technologies Cloud platform can be Pivotal, leveraging the underlying PKS (Pivotal Container Service) that is present on the Dell Technologies Cloud solution set,” said Baker. “You can layer on that PaaS layer which allows developers to build, run and operate applications seamlessly.”

At Dell Technologies World on Monday, the company also unveiled a new consumption-based, on-premise offering: Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service. The cloud managed services are provided for VMware Cloud Foundation, the VMware Cloud stack and VxRail that will be fully managed by Dell Technologies and sold by partners.

Dell Technologies World is being held in Las Vegas from April 29 to May 2.