DT recently announced the arrival of VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell Technologies VxRail—a fast and easy path to deploy and operate hybrid cloud through a fully integrated platform. Cloud Foundation on VxRail offers the operational hub for hybrid cloud, delivering consistent infrastructure and consistent operations with full stack integrity—meaning a seamless experience from the hyper-converged infrastructure.
VxRail delivers an experience that is not available on any other on-premises infrastructure running VMware Cloud Foundation. Delivering a unified user experience, VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail is lifecycle managed as one complete, automated, turnkey on-premises experience, greatly reducing risk and increasing IT operational efficiency.
Surajit Sen, Chief of Staff, Modern Data Centre-APJ, Dell Technologies tell us more about Dell’s upcoming plans.
What are the latest offerings by Dell Technologies in HCI?
Dell Technologies recently announced VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell Technologies VxRail – a fast and easy path to deploy and operate hybrid cloud through a fully integrated platform. VxRail is the only fully integrated, preconfigured, and tested HCI appliance powered by VMware vSAN™ and is the standard for transforming VMware infrastructures. It provides a simple, cost-effective hyper-converged solution that solves a wide range of current challenges and supports almost any use case, including tier-one applications and mixed workloads. It enables faster, better, and simpler delivery of virtual desktops, business-critical applications, and remote office infrastructure. In addition, VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail allows for management of all cloud operations through a familiar set of tools, offering a consistent experience, across all cloud workloads.
Our customers also use Azure Cloud Services to modernize core IT capabilities and to enhance premise data center capabilities with Azure cloud-based services. Dell Technologies collaborated with Microsoft and came up with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, a hyper-converged Windows Server 2019 cluster that uses validated hardware to run virtualized workloads on-premises, optionally connecting to Azure services for cloud-based backup, site recovery and more. Dell Technologies’ Azure-dedicated portfolio today includes support for both Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI. Azure Stack, an extension of Azure on-premises that can run on Dell Technologies hyper-converged engineered systems, allows users to consistently build and run cloud applications anywhere across the Azure ecosystem, using the Azure Portal with Azure IaaS and PaaS services.
How has Dell Technologies’ journey been in HCI?
Dell Technologies’ journey in HCI has been remarkable with the company maintaining its leading position year after year. In the fourth quarter of 2019, Dell Technologies has extended the company’s massive hyper-converged market share gap between itself and all competitors, winning one-third of the global market. Dell Technologies led with $760m revenues, up 37.6 per cent, and 33.3 per cent share of market – thanks to the continued strong growth of VxRail and the breadth of our HCI portfolio. We continue to expand our CI and HCI leadership through advancing our portfolio, based on customer feedback, and by delivering the fastest and simplest paths to achieving IT outcomes, innovation and business goals. We do this through industry leading and trusted technologies, close collaborations for tightly integrating offerings, and the industry’s most diverse portfolio that enables us to offer incredible solutions for any type of computing environment and customer preference.
How has Dell Technology managed to stay ahead of its competition?
At Dell technologies, we believe ensuring customer satisfaction is the key to maintain leadership. Working closely with our customers, we help them modernize their IT infrastructure to stay competitive. We help our customers increase their productivity, performance, scalability and reducing the footprint in their data center through our HCI solution. HCI is slowly emerging in enterprise applications along with bringing new opportunities in the market. Starting from finance to manufacturing, IT and ITeS, telecom and government, we have several small and larger companies as customers in India.
Our strength in HCI lies in the breadth of our portfolio. Our portfolio is built on the pillars of modern IT: flash, cloud-enabled, scale-out and software-defined technologies- helping organisations accomplish complex workloads with ease and agility. Additionally, our HCI solution helps organisations to scale as business expands and operate more efficiently.
Moreover, our portfolio is built on industry-leading PowerEdge servers to deliver cloud-like agility, scalability and simplified IT management with data protection built in. Customers can chose from simple appliances or rack scale ready-made end-to-end HCI based solution. In case of hybrid clouds, customer can chose any Dell Technologies platform to build their cloud, while at the same time, they can also buy complete solutions like EHC and Azure stack and cut deployment times into less than half. In addition we differentiate ourselves in packaging our solutions. Our solutions come with data protection, disaster recovery, and data backup solutions in-built with lowest bandwidth.
Why do you think more Indian enterprises will go for HCI solution in the coming years?
While the HCI architecture started with an adoption in large enterprises, over time, it has matured to encompass customers of all size, complexity and workloads. There has been a rapid adoption rate of HCI in both the Indian and global markets due to its architecture which suits both hybrid and multi-cloud. Other contributory factors are simplified DevOps, micro services, containers and the Wave 2 adoption for business critical applications on HCI. Indian organizations are increasingly realizing these benefits and are increasingly looking at HCI solutions for their businesses.
Hence, adoption of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure in India is expected to grow significantly as these systems can help address some of the critical challenges faced in today’s fast growing IT landscape. Datacenters have restrictions when it comes to scaling easily because of the legacy infrastructure and the related migration challenges. Organizations are fixing these scalability needs by adding resources but this process is getting complex. They are also looking for complete open environment, so that they can plug n play the required resources without any integration challenges and be more flexible to organizational needs. These are some of the areas where HCI can simplify the process, improve performance, scalability and reduction in hardware footprint in Datacenters – leading to increased adoption of HCI solutions.