Dell EMC’s latest announcements will help address many of the data centre challenges organizations face today with new automation and analytics capabilities, according to Dell EMC’s vice-president of product marketing,
“This is really a year when we’re seeing a multi-cloud strategy become a top priority for most of our data centre customers today,” says Jon Siegal. “They’re looking for a workload flexibility based on application demand so they can manage the data wherever it resides, on or off-prem. They also want flexibility and choice with their private clouds, while at the same time, having a consistent operational experience no matter where those workloads reside. That really brings us to [hyper-converged infrastructure] HCI and [converged infrastructure] CI.”
Dell EMC’s hyper-converged infrastructure appliance, VxRail, received dedicated networking through an integration with a component of the Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition network operating system called Dell EMC Smart Fabric Services.
“VxRail will become the first HCI appliance in the market with fully automated networking configurations,” Siegal says. “It’s really going to become an easy button for networking with HCI.”
VxRail can now be managed directly through the VMware vCenter Server console, which approximately 500,000 customers use, he adds.
VxBlock gets a big upgrade
Siegal describes the added automation and real-time analytics capabilities for the Dell EMC VxBlock – the company’s converged infrastructure systems – as the “single biggest innovation we have ever had with VxBlock.”
According to Siegal, VxBlock now includes a new launch point to vRealize Operations Manager to manage storage and access the newly added analytics capabilities.
“At the heart of all this is the VxBlock Central, which is a single unified interface and access point for the operations,” he says, adding it will create a strong foundation for infrastructure-as-a-service on VxBlock.
The channel partner community has been critical to Dell EMC’s success, indicates Siegal, and he’s particularly impressed with the work done on VMware.
“We’re enabling our partners to become consultants with their own end users,” he says. “Now they can come to the table with a combination of offerings that come together in an integrated fashion.”
Chris Wolf, vice-president and CTO of global field and industry at VMware, said his company’s deeper integration with Dell EMC shouldn’t worry VMware partners or customers that aren’t currently part of Dell’s ecosystem.
“Michael Dell is a brilliant businessman, and he knows that VMware has become a strong player in the ecosystem by being independent,” he says, pointing to other significant partnerships with companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “He wants to ensure that we don’t do anything different as a company.”
Current and new VxBlock System customers can download Dell EMC VxBlock Central software in December. The VxBlock Central Base software license comes with the purchase of a new VxBlock System.
More news
- 25 GbE-enabled S5220-ON top-of-rack switches being added to Dell EMC’s open networking offerings, available now.
- VMware Cloud on AWS is expanding to central Canada in the first quarter of 2019
- The list of VMware Cloud Verified partners continues to expand and currently sits at 27 globally. Three of them have data centres in Canada, including IBM, ThinkOn, and OVH.
