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Dell EMC, in final prep to host 25,000 attendees at its annual conference in Las Vegas May 8 through 10, on May 4 let loose a fairly significant news story ahead of that event.
The company, which launched its hybrid cloud on VxRail appliances on March 31, is in the final stages of another version of enterprise cloud, Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, which will be ready for prime time in the second half of 2017.
This is a new hybrid cloud platform designed to offer a fast track for building and maintaining hybrid clouds that run on Microsoft Azure Stack. It’s all about standardizing on the Microsoft Azure ecosystem with its automated IT service delivery for both traditional and cloud-native applications.
“This is a turnkey extension of our hybrid cloud platform, now based on the Azure stack,” Dell EMC Senior Vice-President Peter Cutts told eWEEK. “This is where we think the evolution of HC (converged infrastructure) and HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) is going, by taking it up to include the cloud operating system and cloud operating models, all the way up to the user experience across the board. This could be a data scientist with a self-service portal, developers in the infrastructure, or delivering an application with data protection and allowing all the operations around that.
‘Cloud is an Operating Model, Not a Place’
“Cloud is an operating model, not a place, and adopting a hybrid model has become the clear choice,” Cutts said.
Dell, and now Dell EMC, have been developing these hybrid cloud development and app distribution platforms for three years. How, exactly, is “turnkey” defined in this solution?
“This is really about bringing in an offering where within a few weeks, from floor tile to fully enabled, self-service portal, you have the ability to deliver applications or VMs as a service, or IaaS (infrastructure as a service), up to full operational capabilities,” Cutts said. “Turnkey for us means literally bringing that cloud experience to one of our customers–both on premises to allow them to become the broker, and to be able to present and consume services from public cloud at the same time.”
Dell launched the industry’s first Microsoft-based hybrid cloud in October 2015. According to IDC, Dell EMC was No. 1 in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market in 2016 with $5.7 billion in revenue and 17.6 percent market share.
The new offering complements turnkey platforms Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, introduced three years ago, and Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud that integrate hardware, software and automation.
Interoperability with Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Interoperability between public and private cloud resources has become a major requirement for many IT managers. The Azure Stack cloud offers a consistent experience across Azure public cloud and private with Azure Stack, Cutts said. It is engineered with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC Networking. As a hybrid cloud platform, it is built, sustained and supported as a singular platform with a turnkey stack.
This consistent programming surface between Azure and Azure Stack enables cost-effective access and sharing of traditional and cloud-native application services without sacrificing security, protection, service quality and availability, Cutts said.
Users of Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure can extend their environments to Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, to produce hybrid models with consistent services, APIs and consumption models for on- and off-premises.