Dell Cloud goes public as software is the new hardware. Dell and VMware have hooked up to create Cloud services based on VMware vCloud Datacenter Services, providing a “seamless multi-tenant environment for virtual systems.”
The service will provide enterprise level, public, private and hybrid clouds – its the first public cloud offering to beta customers, ran from Dell’s data center in Plano, Texas.
This latest move “supports Dell’s strategy to provide customers next-generation computing solutions composed of hardware, software and services,” it said yesterday, and comes as fellow tech giant HP recently announced plans to jump off the hardware ship as margins and revenue go stale.
HP also said it will concentrate on its future cloud and high margin software services and IBM are also building towards providing a similar cloud based offering.
The Dell Cloud will also offer consulting and Infrastructure-as-a-Service to help companies “transform IT environment and integrate business cloud services effectively” and will be offered on a pay-as-you-go basis or long term contractual basis including hardware options.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offers a choice of hosting and outsourcing firms, system integrators and service providers in order to manage on-demand capacity, or as a platform to respond to changing business needs.
In April, the desktop kings announced $US1billion investment this year into development of data centres and moving into cloud services.
Dell also partnered with Trend Micro on the venture, announced yesterday at VM World event in Las Vegas.
Datacenter infrastructure are also highly secure, protected via monitoring of network firewalls, web application firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and vulnerability scanning.
Dell Cloud includes several options:
Public – Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service: enterprise-class, secure offer of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) hosted in a secure Dell datacenter. Also provides access to vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls, and catalog capabilities.
Private – Dell will build private clouds at either customer’s datacenter or Dell datacenters leveraging VMware offerings including VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director as well as Dell’s vStart offering.
Hybrid – Dell and VMware provide a single source to substantially simplify the management of customers’ physical and VMware vSphere-based virtual data center infrastructure adding flexibility to customer requirements. Utilising VMware vCloud Connector, the hybrid cloud solution provides management of on- or off-premise private cloud and Dell’s Public cloud offering.
The service will be available in the U.S. later this this year with rollout in Q4 and to Asia Pacific region including Australia in 2012.
“Dell is excited to announce with VMware our first Public cloud offering that will provide customers with a secure, enterprise solution.
“With one of the largest bases of VMware installed customers, we will be able to provide seamless interoperability with existing VMware environments,” says Steve Schuckenbrock, President, Dell Services.
Analysts IDC have also welcomed the service: “Our customer surveys show data security and privacy still top the list of concerns about implementing cloud services, and Dell’s new cloud is designed to address those concerns.
“Interestingly, this offering should allow Dell to address surveyed customers’ second greatest concern, which is migrating systems with on-premise data or applications to the cloud.”
Reports also suggest Dell will team up with Microsoft’s Azure software as well as another open platform cloud infrastructure possibly OpenStack or Eucalyptus
to offer platform-as-a-service options from next year.
