I was just reading the latest Dell EMC pulse blog, and wanted to add a few additional thoughts from a VMware’s perspective. In his blog, Gil talks about the history and parallels of VxRail and VxRack SDDC, the importance of the close collaboration between Dell EMC and VMware, VxRack SDDC as the VMware Cloud Foundation powered turnkey SDDC solution based on Dell PowerEdge, and the customer value that VxRack SDDC brings to market around lifecycle management and IT automation.
We could not be more excited about bringing to market VMware Cloud Foundation as part of Dell EMC’s VxRack SDDC solution. Dell EMC was our first strategic OEM partner for VMware Cloud Foundation, and the partnership remains strong and vibrant. With VxRack SDDC, our joint customers will be able to leverage the benefits of VMware Cloud Foundation around a radically simplified operating model, automated lifecycle management, enterprise class scalability and performance. By integrating NSX into VMware Cloud Foundation with VxRack SDDC, Dell EMC and VMware have taken hyper-converged infrastructure to the next level beyond compute and storage.
Allow me a brief detour to discuss the ways customer can experience VMware Cloud Foundation.
Here at VMware, we use the term “consumption model” to describe the avenues by which a customer can get their hands on VMware Cloud Foundation. There are three consumption models: Integrated Systems, vSAN Ready Nodes and Public Cloud.
Integrated System
You’re looking for a turnkey system powered by VMware Cloud Foundation and you don’t want to worry about building your own infrastructure. You don’t want the headache of maintaining your infrastructure. You want one throat to choke for all your hardware and software support needs. VxRack SDDC is for you.
Qualified vSAN Ready Nodes
A wide choice of hardware is important to you. You’re willing to invest in building and maintaining your own infrastructure, but you don’t want to start from scratch. You’re looking for a pre-engineered VMware’s stack with vSphere, vSAN and NSX as your basis for compute, network and storage virtualization. VCF on qualified ready systems is for you.
Public Cloud
You want a hybrid model, which allows you to run some workloads on your premises and some in the public cloud. At the same time, you look for the same operational experience on premises and in your cloud. IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions (available now) and VMware Cloud on AWS (in preview) is for you.
These models are not exclusive. We’ve seen customers choose VxRack SDDC for their mission-critical data center use cases, e.g. to operate a disaster and crisis management center, where time to value was of utmost importance (“Integrated System”). Another customer wanted a tailored VCF system on premises (“vSAN Ready Nodes”) and the option to cloud-burst with confidence into a VCF based public cloud offering (“Public Cloud”). Choice is good.
End of detour.
Adding to Dell EMC’s strength in the HCI space, is what Gil refers to as the “Dell EMC’s hyper-converged options”. The proposition here is that no customer is the same. While VxRack SDDC will satisfy the needs of customers looking for a turnkey hyper-converged SDDC at scale, VxRail is aimed at the customer looking for a more traditional compute/storage HCI appliance. Again, choice is good.
In summary, we believe Cloud Foundation when paired with Dell EMC’s VxRack SDDC provides customers a unique choice to operate VMware compute, network and storage virtualization technologies.
