THE IT TRANSFORMATION GOSPEL ACCORDING TO DELL EMC
According to David Goulden, President- Dell EMC, CIOs are constantly looking for cost reduction and innovation and when they look at IT transformation, they would inevitably end up in hybrid cloud. But how does one get there? Said David, “IT transformation essentially has three parts: modernize data center, automate service delivery, transform IT operations. This is what Dell EMC helps to achieve.”
David neatly summarized application workloads on cloud thus: mission-critical business applications such as Oracle, SAP; general applications built on Java, .NET, SQL Server; and cloud native applications built on Python, Cassandra, MongoDB, etc. Further, these applications need to be run and need to be managed. David said that VMWare is excellent for running all types of applications, but the difference comes in the ‘manage’ part. This is where an all-public cloud strategy is not the best fit. Said David, “Virtustream is the best bet for managing mission-critical applications, VMWare is the best for managing general purpose applications, and Pivotal is the native option for cloud applications.” This kind of differentiation based on best approaches for different application workloads that David mentioned is the cornerstone of Dell EMC’s hybrid IT or cloud and onpremise vs. off-premise strategy.
To round out this approach, David said that Dell EMC’s approach is to have the most suited cloud model available for all applications.
GEARING UP THE MODERN DATA CENTER
Let’s take a look at Dell EMC’s infrastructure strategy and product offerings. The key attributes of a modern data center are: flash-based, scaleout, software-defined, cloud-enabled, and trusted. The fastest and easiest way to achieve this is through converged and hyperconverged infrastructure made up of blocks, appliances, and racks. Examples include Vblock, VxBlock, VxRack, VxRail and others. Citing an example of Dell EMC’s speed in this area, David said that VxRAIL was launched a year ago, today VxRail 4.5 is the leading hyperconvergence product in the market with cloud pricing (no cash upfront, no long-term obligation, simple payments) available for the product.
Besides the converged infrastructure offerings, Dell EMC’s product portfolio for data centers covers servers, networking, data protection, and storage. In areas such as networking, the emphasis is on software-defined approach. For example, VMware NSX is a network virtualization and security platform, VSAN is a storage virtualization platform, David said. Dell EMC’s storage portfolio is also robust and well differentiated, running across store-protect-manage cycles, comprising all-flash, elastic cloud, scale-out arrays, clustered/ NAS, hybrid flash and entry/ midrange storage, object storage, unified storage, and various other cloud and software-defined storage.
OPENING OUT TO THE WORLD
Josh Bernstein, VP Technology, Dell EMC is the executive leader of {code} by Dell EMC. In this role, Josh is tasked with making Dell EMC relevant in the third party ecosystem like open source by advancing thought leadership, contributing code, and participating in industry groups that influence future developments. For example, Dell EMC joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in March to be part of a group of companies that leverages open source for cloud native applications.
The {code} by Dell EMC team is responsible for creating entirely new projects, contributing to thought
The differentiation based on best cloud approaches for different application workloads is the cornerstone of Dell EMC’s hybrid IT or cloud and onpremise vs. off-premise strategy
leading existing products, as well as evangelize, and create awareness for leading edge technologies.
Josh makes an important distinction that his team does not write software to sell, but that they write software for Dell to interoperate. The {code} by Dell EMC has between 10 to 20 members in the team supported by 26 virtual extensions called ‘code catalysts’.
The {code} by Dell EMC has been running for over two years and currently has about 90 projects underway that straddles networking, Openstack, object storage, VMware, ECS, Cloud Foundry, and containerization amongst others. An example of the work done by this group is REX-Ray which is a vendor agnostic storage orchestration engine for containerization. Says Josh, “We look for specific problems to solve. For example, the team is currently working to solve the problem of data persistence on containerized platforms like Mesos and Docker.”
THE SHINY NEW 14G SERVER
The key highlight at DEW 2017 was the preview and announcement of summer launch of 14th generation of the PowerEdge server portfolio.
According to the press release on the launch, the newly designed 14th generation of servers form a secure, scalable compute platform that is the ideal foundation for cloud, analytics, or software-defined data center initiatives. The new portfolio delivers innovation in three key areas: Scalable business architecture optimizes data centers for a wide variety of new and emerging workload requirements