“The idea of digital transformation starts with IT transformation, which requires customers to modernize their data centers with infrastructure designed to simplify their data landscape, optimize workloads at any scale and secure an organization’s most valuable asset – data,” says Amit Mehta, Director – Modern Data Centre, Dell Technologies.
From an interaction with Amit Mehta, Director – Modern Data Centre, Dell Technologies.
What are the various Data Storage Solutions offered by Dell Technologies?
To aid businesses in their journey of IT transformation, Dell Technologies offers cutting-edge storage portfolio. At Dell Technologies World 2019, Dell revealed new, modern infrastructure solutions for the IT landscape – from the edge to core data centers to public and private clouds. These latest technologies can deliver the foundation customers need to create, process, transport, store, protect and consume data – wherever it lives. Some of the new storage solutions launched were:
- Dell Technologies Cloud- A new set of cloud infrastructure solutions to make hybrid cloud environments simpler to deploy and manage. It combines the power of VMware and Dell EMC infrastructure, removing the cloud complexity by offering consistent infrastructure and operations for IT resources, across public and private clouds and the edge, regardless of location
- Dell EMC Unity XT- The next generation of Dell EMC Unity Midrange storage solution which offers up to 2X faster than its predecessor and 67% faster than its closest competitor. In addition, Dell EMC Unity can be a building block for the Dell Technologies Cloud as part of a validated design
- Dell EMC Isilon OneFS 8.2- A solution for customers to keep pace with the data deluge in AI use cases. It provides massive scalability, enhanced cloud integration and security to support the most demanding file workloads
- Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services: It is an expansion of cloud-enabled infrastructure solutions, which aids enterprises of all sizes to extend their on-premises infrastructure to public cloud for a variety of use cases, including disaster recovery (DR), analytics etc.
Can you brief us about the new Cloud Infrastructure Solutions that Dell Technologies is offering in association with VMware?
VMware Cloud on Dell EMC combines Dell EMC VxRail with core technology from VMware, previewed as Project Dimension at VMworld 2018 US. This Dell Technologies Cloud offering enables organizations to consume infrastructure, like a public cloud service, in data center and edge environments. This allows IT organizations to eliminate the need for basic tasks, such as infrastructure management and maintenance, with subscription-based pricing. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC also offers a bi-directional connection to public clouds for application and data portability via a hybrid cloud control plane. Delivered in a Data Center-as-a-Service model for their on-premises environments, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is co-engineered and delivered by Dell Technologies with the ongoing service fully managed by VMware. This means organizations can leave infrastructure management, troubleshooting and maintenance to VMware, and instead focus on differentiating their business by building innovative applications. They also can take advantage of enterprise-grade data services, security and resiliency, built into the solution, and provision add-on services such as backup, disaster-recovery and bursting capabilities.
Remember VMware is “First & Best” when deployed with Dell Technologies.
What are the USPs of these solutions? How does it differ from those offered by your competitors?
Organizations deploying Dell Technologies Cloud can:
- Increase agility – Employ familiar VMware tools to provision, govern, automate and orchestrate applications across multiple cloud deployment options. This gives organizations workload placement flexibility through a single operational hub across public, private and edge clouds, backed by a broad, global network of cloud service providers.
- Accelerate innovation – Adopt the simple and quick path to deploy hybrid cloud. With VMware Cloud Foundation now available natively on Dell EMC VxRail, Dell Technologies Cloud Platforms offer the industry’s first jointly engineered, hybrid cloud infrastructure stack tightly integrated with VMware’s flexible, full stack HCI architecture. Customers also can opt to extend the cloud experience on-premises by deploying Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 converged infrastructure and Dell Technologies validated storage, compute and networking options.
- Improve cloud economics – Manage applications seamlessly across various clouds while saving time and cost by eliminating unnecessary application re-platforming. Organizations also can align how they pay for IT with how they do business through a range of options to buy, rent or consume IT as a service through Dell Financial Services.6 IDC research found that Dell Technologies Cloud can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 47% compared to native public cloud.1
- Help reduce business risk – Enhance confidence in operations through the delivery of IT services backed by built-in security and automated lifecycle management from the cloud vendor enterprises trust with their most critical workloads. Organizations benefit from the experience and trusted solutions of the industry’s top cloud IT infrastructure provider to improve service levels and deliver on business requirements.
What market share does Dell Technologies occupy in the Cloud market?
According to IDC, Dell EMC ranked #1 with a 27.4% industry share in 2018. In the external storage market, Dell Inc. ranked No.1 in all quarters in 2018, with 24.7% industry share by vendor revenue in Q4. Dell EMC maintained its undisputed leadership in India’s external storage industry by vendor revenue, i.e. nearly 1.5x the nearest competitor. The Indian cloud computing market currently stands at $2.2 billion and is expected to grow to $4 billion by 2020 with an annual growth rate of more than 30%
What are the challenges that you are facing with relation to the Data Centres?
A section of our large enterprise customers are in the process of revamping their Data Center strategies and Consolidation is a big part of that. Consolidating from multiple sites to 2 to 3 sites, creating multiple landing zones with different vendors for business resiliency purposes, Asynchronous replication of applications across a number of sites are some of the themes we are addressing.
For customers who want to continue to Build on their traditional 3 Tier Architecture, we leverage the 5 pillars of our Modern Datacenter Strategy to help customers drive Business Agility and Cost reduction. These are Flash/NVMe, Scale out, Software defined, Cloud Enabled, AI/ML embedded to help them with their new blueprints.
For Customers who are looking to Buy business outcomes we are offering our software defined Converged and hyperconverged infrastructure.
Data Center Automation is a big discussion agenda. Customers are struggling with a plethora of automation tools in their environment. One tool for Infrastructure, one for applications and yet another for processes. What they are asking for is an environment which provides them with an “Application to Silicon” Visibility and control and look at a Cloud Operating model to be implemented in their Data Centers. We are working with customers through our Services organization in helping them navigate this maze and come to a desired business outcome.
And finally the last area is around setting up Disaster Recovery set ups and many of them are looking at leveraging Public Cloud /Service provider options. We work with these set of customers and use our Workload and Application Rationalisation services approach and decide the optimum Hybrid Cloud Strategy basis performance, latency, SLAs, Regulatory, costs criterion. We have a set of Cloud Mobility and Cloud Protection Data Services which the customers can leverage to take control of their data and move between multiple clouds and also protect this data.
Which market verticals are you targeting?
There is a growing multi-cloud trend adoption in many verticals, especially in the IT vertical, where they will deploy Office 365 in Azure, Oracle in an Oracle cloud, and SAP system in a SAP service provider. For mission-critical applications, the infrastructure can be stored on-premises, and they will have an operations control that will manage data across all these facets. Other than IT, the government and the unicorns born and matured in the cloud are utilizing the multi-cloud in a big way.
