Last week, I attended my first Dell Technologies World. What a fantastic event! Topics spanned from the massive scale of public clouds down to some really cool 2 in 1 laptops (when is my MacBook up for refresh?). Being in our Storage and Availability Business Unit (SABU), I’ll focus on the topics most relevant to our beloved vSAN.
Our CEO Pat Gelsinger joined Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Vice Chairman, Products and Operations, Jeff Clarke on stage to introduce the new Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, the comprehensive vision for cloud across the Dell Technologies family of companies. Anchoring this new strategy is VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, which will provide simple, more secure and scalable infrastructure delivered as-a-service to customer’s on-premises data center and edge locations. This is the first productization of what was announced at VMworld 2018 as ‘Project Dimension.’
VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is built on VMware Cloud Foundation and runs on Dell EMC’s VxRail hyperconverged appliance. It will be a fully managed service by VMware and become a core offering of the new Dell Technologies Cloud.
Dell EMC’s Chad Dunn did a fantastic demo showing how easy it is to connect on premises VCF to AWS and migrate workloads in a couple of clicks within a single control plane – amazing! Through this solution, VMware will bring a cloud delivery model of core infrastructure to the datacenter, thereby simplifying our customer’s environment and creating even more opportunity for innovation.
Following these announcements, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Pat and Michael on stage to announce an expanded partnership between Microsoft, Dell Technologies and VMware, spanning client and cloud. Through this collaboration, Microsoft will offer a fully supported and certified VMware cloud infrastructure service on Microsoft Azure.
The service will be delivered through VMware Cloud Verified partners, Virtustream and CloudSimple, and will be called Azure VMware Solutions (by Virtustream or CloudSimple). It will be built on VMware Cloud Foundation and deployed in Azure along with an integrated set of Azure services. Customers will be able to build, run, manage and better secure new and existing applications across VMware environments and Microsoft Azure, while extending a single model for operations based on established tools, skills and processes as part of a hybrid cloud strategy. This new service further extends VMware’s strategy for hybrid cloud and provides greater flexibility for customers that want to operate in Azure but leverage VMware infrastructure and operations.
These announcements with Microsoft represent a big day for VMware’s ecosystem strategy and multi-cloud vision – with AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba and 4000+ VCPP partners, all embracing VMware in helping customers through their hybrid cloud journey.
In conclusion, these announcements advance our commitment to giving customers the ultimate freedom to build any app, deploy to any cloud and deliver to any device while advancing our leadership in hybrid cloud.
After reading this tweet from my friend Stephen Foskett, I am reminded it is time to start thinking about VMworld 2019 – back to Moscone Center!
