Dell EMC Flexes IT Infrastructure and Financial Muscle

At the Dell EMC World 2017 conference today, Dell EMC moved to reduce the upfront costs associated with acquiring converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliances that would be deployed in an on-premises IT environment to effectively zero.

Via a new Cloud Flex for HCI program that is modeled on the way IT organizations currently acquire infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services, organizations can now treat IT infrastructure as an operating expense if they so desire, in much the same way they pay for public cloud computing services. That pricing model will be extended to Dell EMC rack servers in the third quarter.

“We’re going to get very aggressive on cloud-like pricing,” says Jeremy Burton, chief marketing officer for Dell Technologies, the parent company of Dell EMC. “We think we can do that as a private company.”

At the same time, however, Dell EMC is adding a series of single processor converged infrastructure appliances to its portfolio that push the costs of acquiring HCI appliances to as low as $25,000.

At the higher end, Dell also unveiled a 14^th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge server configured with NVMe storage and a new management console based on revamped application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as adding a new Dell EMC portfolio in a S5100-ON series top-of-rack networking switch that provides 25GbE in-rack connectivity and 100GbE uplink connections.

Dell EMC also previewed Project Nautilus, an effort to optimize storing and analyzing high volumes of streaming data. Dell EMC is also adding faster VMAX storage arrays, higher capacity Dell EMC Unity arrays, and updates to XtremeIO X2 that add inline compression and support for flash-optimized components, along with updates to Dell EMC ScaleIO and Dell Isilon storage portfolio.

Finally, in the realm of data protection, Dell EMC is rolling out another family of data protection appliances that Dell EMC says is 10 times faster than previous offerings.

Coming off a $1.7 billion loss the fourth quarter, Dell EMC clearly views its next fiscal 2018 year as make or break for validating the largest merger in the history of IT. While it remains to be seen how that corporate drama will ultimately play out, the one thing that is for certain is that IT organizations will be seeing a lot more bang for their IT infrastructure buck in the months and years ahead.