On the occasion of the Dell Technologies World event (April 29 to May 2 in Las Vegas), the company focused on integration, especially with VMware.
From the cloud to the workspace, it’s time for unification. Live from Las Vegas, it was almost forgotten, but when Dell bought EMC and its environment, the synergies between the different offers were included in the agreement. The first years were busy structuring this Leviathan of IT and the integration took place in fits and starts. On the Dell Technologies World conference (April 29 – May 2 in Las Vegas), Michael Dell focused his speech on the joint work between the various entities of the group, first and foremost, VMware.
On stage, Jeff Clarke, vice president, products and operations of Dell Technologies, and Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, presented the various announcements together and insisted at length on their collaboration and that of their teams to align hardware and software. VMware, the essential brick of Dell Technologies Cloud The first topic was the cloud and more precisely the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. “Today, 93% of businesses use multi-cloud with more than five different architectures. With the hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, private cloud and edge, we have created cloud silos and this is a nightmare to manage, “says Pat Gelsinger. He adds, “Businesses need consistency, consistency.
In short, the cloud without chaos. On the hybrid cloud side, the IT giant presents Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, combining Dell-EMC convergence and hyper-convergence offerings with VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) expertise. On this last point, the availability of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on VxRail has been formalized. For the record, VCF is the integrated software stack for deploying and managing cloud infrastructures. It includes vSphere, VSAN, NSX, vCenter and the vRealize suite (Log Insight, Automation, Operations), as well as SDDC Manager.
The goal is to “simplify and automate provisioning tasks through software-defined, deployment of cloud workloads, but also software lifecycle management, updates, security patches” Ghil Shneorson, vice president and general manager of VxRail at Dell. Dedicated Dimension project Another floor of the Dell Technologies Cloud umbrella brand, the data center as a service offering aims to bring VMware Cloud, an application portfolio such as VSAN or the Velocloud SD-WAN to the on-premise world. The virtualization specialist has already had the opportunity to experience this offering on AWS and is now bringing it to the Dell EMC infrastructure. Today’s announcement is also part of the implementation of the “Dimension” project, presented a year ago, which aims to offer cloud, compute, storage and network management on demand.
Customer data centers whether they are in central or local (Edge). This strategy follows the market trend of bringing in key elements to the on-premise environments. Microsoft pioneered this with Azure Stack, then AWS launched Outpost, and recently Google relied on containers with the Anthos service. Dell EMC puts its strength in the infrastructure market and especially in hyper-convergence by associating it with VMware and its installed base. Note that the data center as a service offer will only be available in the second half of 2019.
The event also brought a lot of surprises with the presence of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft to announce the possibility for customers to Azure to use VMware solutions (cloud foundation in particular) to manage their IT operations in the cloud. This facility prevents companies from “re-architecting their applications or re-tooling operations,” says Pat Gelsinger. The latter added with humor that he was happy to be on stage with Satya Nadella, because “for a decade, I had not had someone from Microsoft”. The war of hypervisors is over and customers are demanding a streamlining of solutions to manage their adventure in the cloud. A unified digital workspace Integration between VMware and Dell extends to the client workstation.
The Virtualization Specialist Workspace One solution becomes Workspace Unified and enables you to manage a fleet of devices, deploy services seamlessly and securely. For this, VMware relies on its MDM expertise and on Dell’s knowledge of the hardware part (PC, laptop, …), not to mention the security brick provided by SecureWorks.
On this point, Dell launches the SafeBIOS service which allows to check the Bios in production mode and reduce the attack surface. As a follow-up to the partnership with Microsoft, the integration is further between Workspace One and Intune and Active Directory, but also with Office 365. In the end, the future of cloud and end-user computing is clearly in the integration and in the opening of the platforms. IT companies have understood this well and are advancing with their own strategy. Dell has inherited the acquisition of EMC nugget named VMware, he has made the glue to combine all its services including cloud.