Bring the Cloud Experience to your Data Center and Edge
Today at VMworld we announced that VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is now available. That means you’re now able to get it in your datacenter and edge locations!
This is a great milestone for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. The team has been hard at work preparing to get this into customers’ hands. And we’ve come a long way in just a short time. A quick recap of the major announcements in the last year:
We announced Project Dimension at VMworld 2018. Project Dimension was the proof of concept effort whose technology foundation went into creating VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.
Now that VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is available, we can provide more specifics about the service. First is the hardware configuration. The hardware is delivered in a rack configuration as illustrated here:
As you can see, the rack is fairly self-sufficient and simply requires network and power connections. The first rack type available is called (surprisingly!) R1. R1’s can hold between three and six servers. Note that one of the hosts is “dark” and typically not available for customer applications. It is spun up during maintenance, upgrades, or other events that cause host downtime. It allows us to provide a reliable service for applications running on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.
Initially there will be a single server type called G1 based on VxRail technology. Its configuration is as follows:
Dell EMC VxRail G1 E560F
Intel Cascade Lake, 20 cores @ 2.5GHz
192 GB RAM
52 TB raw storage
2x
Over time we plan to add more rack and server options, eventually getting to the point where there is a broad spectrum of options to support the smallest edge locations to the largest data centers.
Use Cases
As we’ve worked with customers during the beta phase, a few clear trends around use cases appeared for both data center and edge locations.
Let’s start with the edge. We’re seeing a lot of interest from customers who have many edge locations without IT staff present. This presents two challenges: managing remotely and managing at scale. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC helps on both counts. Customers are able to deliver reliable infrastructure to these locations without the need to build out mobile teams that can be dispatched to fix issues on-site. Instead, they can rely on VMware as a single point of contact to service those locations as necessary, with hardware break-fix support performed by Dell or Dell’s approved third-party partners. Also with the VMware Cloud Console, customers can manage all their locations from a single pane of glass view.
We’ve sized the R1G1 configuration to accommodate the needs of compute-intensive edge locations. We see customers consolidating video, telemetry, voice, and other services onto VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. This simplifies and standardizes the infrastructure footprint at customer edge sites while providing a reliable service for those applications.
On the data center side, we see two primary use cases. The first is data center modernization. Although IT staff are typically present at data centers, customers have told us they’d prefer to have their IT staff working on innovation projects rather than just “keeping the lights on” with tasks such as break/fix, lifecycle management, and more. They can offload these tasks to VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, freeing their IT staff to focus on higher value tasks.
The second use we see is actually data center evacuation. Here customers want to get out of the data center business altogether, but for reasons of security, compliance, performance, or otherwise, don’t want to move their applications to the public cloud. (Though, if they do want to move to the public cloud, VMware Cloud on AWS is a great choice!)
Our solution for this use case is partnerships with colocation providers. We’re working with Equinix to deliver within their co-location sites and VMware and Dell are working hand-in-hand with Equinix to provide complete end-to-end infrastructure solution, from the data center physical infrastructure up through the VMware virtual infrastructure. By using a colocation, like Equinix, customers can get high performance network connectivity to VMware Cloud on AWS via ECX Fabric at Equinix IBX data centers worldwide. This dramatically simplifies the process of building a hybrid cloud!
We’re really excited for both the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC and our partnership with Equinix.
VMworld US 2019
If you are attending VMworld US in San Francisco this week, you can learn more by attending the following sessions:
Spotlight Keynote (EIOT2750BU) – Extend your hybrid cloud strategy to the Edge
Business 100 (HBI2748BU) – Driving business benefits through Hybrid cloud IT outcomes
Business 100 (HCI2560BU) – A new model for IaaS: shifting SLAs to VMware with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC
Business 100 (HBI2293BU) – Build a killer application with VMC on Dell EMC
Technical 100 (HBI1428BU) – VMC on Dell EMC technical overview
Business 100 (HBI2367BU) – Empower the future of modern application with VMC on Dell EMC with a beta customer joining the discussion
Technical 200 (HBI1975BU) – VMC on Dell EMC technical deep dive
Technical 200 (HBI1980BU) – Customer experience, architectures, service benefits
Learn more about VMware Cloud on Dell EMC online, please go to
