VMware Cloud On Dell EMC Now Available, Demand ‘Off The Charts’

‘This is just more proof that if you’re a VMware customer, you should be a Dell EMC customer,’ says Joshua Lee, director of sales at VirtuIT Systems.

Hailing it as the first-to-market VMware Project Dimension solution, the highly anticipated Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center As-A-Service offering is now officially available for partners to sell in the U.S.

“The demand from customers for this solution, which is essentially a fully managed solution sitting in a customer’s data center or edge location, has been off the charts,” said Varun Chhabra, vice president of product marketing for Dell EMC’s Cloud Platform. “We’re very proud to be the first VMware Project Dimension solution in the market. In our work with VMware in this space, we have been hyper-focused in bringing this capability to market as soon as possible.”

As on Monday, the new consumption-based, on-premise platform, delivered as VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, is initially available in the U.S. with global availability in the future. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is based on VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRail, the world’s leading hyper-converged infrastructure offering.

Dell rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise, meanwhile, unveiled Monday its own new VMware offering with VMware Cloud Foundation as a Service on HPE GreenLake, although it won’t be available for another 45 days. HPE’s offering allows channel partners to provide VMware virtual machines (VMs) on a pay-per-use basis with the full VMware Cloud Foundation stack on GreenLake.

[Related: Dell Technologies Cloud Takes Complexity ‘Off The Table’]

VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is sold as a monthly subscription with no Capex outlay in one- or three-year agreements with consumption-based availability. The hybrid cloud service is fully managed by Dell and can be sold by channel partners with the goal of providing the same operational simplicity of the public cloud with the security, control and performance of on-premises infrastructure.

Dell’s new cloud service stemmed from Project Dimension, which extended VMware Cloud to deliver software-defined data center infrastructure and hardware as a service to the on-premises world alongside Dell with built-in technologies including vSAN and SD-WAN by VeloCloud.

Joshua Lee, director of sales at VirtuIT Systems, a Nanuet, N.Y.-based Dell and VMware partner, said customers have been clamoring for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC since it was first unveiled at Dell Technologies World earlier this year.

“We’ve really been beating the drum on this since they announced it. Customers are saying, ‘Hey, when this is available, come tell me more about it.’” said Lee. “This is just more proof that if you’re a VMware customer, you should be a Dell EMC customer. The technology synergies and everything is being super aligned together and the stories are very matched up.”

Lee said customers are beginning to “dip their toe” into some type of hybrid cloud model but are seeking guidance.

“A lot of these customers are internally trying to figure out a hybrid strategy and they need help. For us, we see VMware Cloud on Dell EMC as a great road map and easy button, if you will, to walk customers through and give them a strategic path in how to truly get to a hybrid cloud scenario,” said Lee. “It’s going to give customers the ability to have some choice in what public cloud they want or if they want to potentially go with a Dell Technologies partner under their cloud program. We’re real excited about it.”

Features at the edge with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC include self-service provisioning and elastic infrastructure to boost development speed as well as compliance with data sovereignty and regulatory requirements. It also offers a bi-directional connection to public clouds for application and data portability via a hybrid cloud control plane.

At VMWorld 2019 Monday, the Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure leader unveiled that it is now the preferred partner of VMware in providing data protection on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. “Customers will now be able to provision a variety of data protection solutions from Dell EMC to be able to protect their Data-Center-as-a-Service environment and the data that their running on it,” said Chhabra.

Kit Colbert, vice president and cloud CTO of VMware’s Cloud Platforms business unit, said there is “a ton” of interest from customers to keep their workloads on-premises.

“I know we often hear the narrative that all workloads are moving to the public cloud; that’s just not the case,” said Colbert. “There are many reasons why workloads need to stay on-premise either in a data center or edge location. Sometimes it’s due to compliance in keeping data in certain locations or sometimes it’s due to latency. For example, you look at IoT or factory use cases where machines have sensors and the data coming out of sensors needs to be analyzed in real time to prevent any machine malfunction. Or maybe it’s a cost issue.”

Colbert said VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is a “really powerful” offering. “This is a vast simplification in terms of what customers do today. They don’t need to know about our infrastructure at all, they can consume it as a service just like they do with their cloud service,” he said. “It just so happens that it’s running on-premise.”

VMWorld 2019 in San Francisco runs from Aug. 25 to Aug. 29. The Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is currently is available in the U.S.