Dell EMC Lays HCI Foundation for Hybrid Clouds

EMC prior to the merger with Dell had been making a concerted effort to make it simpler to build hybrid clouds by embedding integration with the VMware vCloud Air platform into a converged infrastructure platform. Now in the wake of the merger, the combined entity announced today it is extending the Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) to include a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform in the form of Dell EMC VxRail appliances.

Peter Cutts, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud Platforms for Dell EMC, says Dell EMC has enjoyed a significant amount of success selling a pre-integrated platform. The company claims to have shipped 8,000 VxRail nodes that in total exceed 65 petabytes of storage and 100,000 processor cores.

This year, Cutts says, Dell EMC will extend EHC to include integrations with both the Virtustream cloud operated by Dell EMC as well as public cloud services offered by IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Dell EMC EHC platform is optimized for VMware, which last year unveiled alliances with both IBM and AWS.

In general, Cutts says, more IT organizations are concluding that integrating infrastructure on their own is too complex in an age when the amount of IT infrastructure that needs to be integrated is becoming overwhelming. In addition, as data centers become denser, many of those same organizations are finding it difficult to configure individual components to meet the needs of I/O sensitive applications. A converged or HCI platform effectively frees up the IT organization to concentrate more efforts on delivering applications rather than optimizing infrastructure, says Cutts.

“Organizations want to focus on developing applications rather than the IT infrastructure,” says Cutts.

The degree to which interest in pre-integrated systems inside the data center morphs into the deployment of turnkey hybrid clouds remains to be seen. But given the current momentum surrounding pre-integrated systems, the stage certainly appears to be set.