The CTO of Dell EMC’s Converged Platforms & Solutions Division also stressed the continuing importance of their Nutanix partnership, emphasizing its centrality to Dell EMC’s growing relationship with Microsoft.

The way that cloud computing is evolving is fundamentally transforming the data centre, and 2017 will see significant growth of both converged [CI] and hyper-converged infrastructure [HCI] in response to this trend. It’s an opportunity that Dell EMC thinks they are well poised to capitalize on. It’s also one they think is exceptionally well suited to their channel partners.

“We are seeing a major evolution in cloud computing, which is blurring the lines between private and public cloud management,” said Trey Layton, CTO of Dell EMC’s Converged Platforms & Solutions Division. “Data centres are becoming boundary-less.”

Layton said that in this new data centre world, the nature of applications is fundamentally changing, which in turn will impact the type of infrastructure customers will purchase to run them.

“Application categories will remain,” he said. “There will still be applications like CRM and inventory management. But how they are constructed and work will change. The growth of cloud has led to the concept of building an application through cloud-native principles – born in the cloud applications – and these are fundamentally different. The applications we see being built now contain intelligence that allow them to be survivable in the event of infrastructure failure. They don’t rely on the infrastructure having to be smart.”

This means what customers want from infrastructure is changing.

“Infrastructure is being built to support those applications, and customers are acquiring infrastructure to support that mindset,” Layton said.

Layton also said that mature organizations are very tactical in how they use the public cloud.

“We see AWS being used extensively by organizations that are relatively immature in their adoption of cloud technologies,” he stated. “They use AWS to provide agile services. A mature organization will manage the off-premise service as an extension of their on-prem capabilities, as an extension of the resource they have on premise. How on-prem and off-prem resources interact will be technological realities both this year and the year to follow.”

All this means that infrastructure providers need to adapt what they build, and converged and hyper-converged infrastructure is the result.

“For infrastructure providers, the end of the days of just selling infrastructure is rapidly approaching,” Layton said. “They need to place new intelligence in the infrastructure that accommodates a software- defined infrastructure. The new standard of intelligence here becomes how much complexity you are abstracting. Our investment in VCE proved we were headed down the right path here, and now we have tripled that investment, because a majority of infrastructure will be acquired based on how quick customers see a return. The promise of hyper-converged is a greater degree of simplicity in the integration, and we have delivered on that.”

This new appeal of hyper-converged has already led it to pass the point where it has become mainstream in the data centre.

“Until last year, hyper-converged was mainly been used in virtualization cases, and for the pots and pans of the data centre,” Layton said. “Only this last year have users begun to trust HCI to run the crown jewels of the organization. It won’t ever take all of it. Some legacy apps require redundancy. HCI is increasingly being used to run mission-critical functions, however.”

As a result, the on-prem component of the data centre going forward will increasingly be a pairing of HCI and converged infrastructure.

“HCI and CI will work in concert with the other,” Layton stated. “CI will be used for specialized data that comes with an array, while HCI will be the general purpose architecture.”

Today, the Dell and EMC hyper-converged portfolios have not yet been blended by the key analyst reports, so Dell EMC remains number two in HCI, behind Nutanix. Inevitably this will change once the two product sets are grouped, but Layton does not foresee a future where the traditional Dell software-defined storage strategy based on partnering with other companies yields to one where Dell EMC units partner mainly with each other.

“We value the partnerships we have today and the ones we will found in the future,” Layton stressed. “We look forward to extending partnerships we have, and to creating new ones.”

Layton also noted that even though Dell EMC has now given primacy to VxRail appliances in the VMware market, and limited its XC line with Nutanix software to the non-VMware hypervisors, that Dell EMC remains strongly committed to the Nutanix relationship.

“The partnership with Nutanix is something we are absolutely committed to, as evidenced by the work we are doing with them and Microsoft,” Layton said. “We will align the XC line to be a premium answer in that space around the Microsoft relationship. We are absolutely going to build infrastructure with Microsoft and the XC is the product we will target at those use cases.”

All this, Layton concluded, means good news for the channel.

“There will be a vibrant economy for the channel in the HCI space and CI spaces,” he said. “Converged and hyper-converged have simplified things, increasing the channel value of engaging with the customer and aligning the right product technologies. Partners are accelerating competence and skills around both CI and HCI. While some partners were slow to make these deployments themselves, we see this more as a maturity of the market problem, as opposed to the technology being too difficult for many partners.”

By Mark Cox, source by ChannelBuzz

Visit ICT Hardware to see more Dell Products

Dell Technologies Founder, Chairman and CEO Michael Dell’s vision for the future of the IT industry is so forward-looking that he wonders if people can adapt to technology as quickly as new technologies are being developed.

He also envisions an important role for channel partners in that tech-forward future.

During a Q&A with partners during the Dell EMC Partner Summit held at the Dell EMC World conference in Austin, Texas this week, Dell took the opportunity to comment on his vision for the next decade or two.

In the past, the aim of technology was to help businesses automate processes, or to make businesses more efficient, he said.

“Now, you say we want to re-imagine the company with all this digital information,” Dell said. “I don’t think anybody really knows what it means, and fortunately, we don’t necessarily have to predict all that. We’re going to provide the infrastructure for the digital future, but it’s you and your customers that are going to create and do all the combinatorial inventions that will result in the big improvements that are coming in the world.”

Dell tackled the explosion of data, saying one of the key challenges for the industry is helping customers figure out how to use the data they produce.

“What are you going to do with all this data?” Dell asked. “When you apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning; there’s also something new occurring called unstructured learning. This isn’t so much people learning in an unstructured way, I’m all for that, too. This is computers learning in an unstructured way.

“So, you release computers on your data and as you get more computing power, the computing engines are discovering correlations among the data that are beyond the comprehension of normal mathematical human beings. It’s a very interesting field of computer science. I think there’s going to be all kinds of things like that.

“I think the intersection of the biosciences and the information sciences is incredibly exciting. There are questions: Can people adapt as quickly as the technology is changing? We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunities ahead and I actually think it’s just the beginning of our industry in that sense.”

Partners said Dell’s grand vision, and the success he’s had so far in bringing Dell and EMC together bode well for the future of the channel.

Chris Kelleher, director of strategic alliances at Insight, a large solution provider that works with Dell EMC, said the opportunities are huge for partners that are positioned correctly. “What’s really exciting about everything coming together is the breadth of the market that we’re going to have the ability to go penetrate,” Kelleher said. “Existing Dell customers, we’re going to be able to go talk to them about EMC and vice versa, it just really opens things up with respect to the channel. Partners like Insight that have traditionally sold both are going to be really well positioned going forward.”

Bob Olwig, vice president of business development and innovation at World Wide Technology, a large solution provider that works with Dell EMC, said Dell’s visibility, willingness to talk to partners and clear love of technology is a good sign for the future. “It’s not a one-and-done with Michael Dell,” Olwig said. “He’s very visible, very participatory. He’s engaged. The breadth of the portfolio, he believes it, and I think he believes it’s a great opportunity for partners to share in that.”

The Dell EMC World conference is taking place in Austin this week. It’s the first major conference since Dell completed its landmark, $58 billion acquisition of EMC in early September, and the event has attracted scores of channel partners from around the world.

By Matt Brown, source by http://www.crn.com

ICT Hardware is one of Dell Partner

Dell Technologies has announced the completion of the acquisition of EMC Corporation, creating a family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organisations to build their digital future, transform IT and protect their most important asset, information.

 

The merger creates a $74bn IT giant with an expansive technology portfolio that solves complex problems for customers in the industry’s fast-growing areas of hybrid cloud, software-defined data centre, converged infrastructure, platform-as-a-service, data analytics, mobility and cybersecurity.

Dell Technologies serves 98% of the Fortune 500 and comprises several market leading businesses.

The two largest, and most well-known, are the Dell client solutions business and the Dell EMC infrastructure solutions business, both of which are supported by Dell EMC Services. In addition, Dell Technologies has Boomi, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware.

 

According to Dell Technologies, the structure combines the focus and innovation of a startup with the global scale and service of a large enterprise.

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, said: “We are at the dawn of the next industrial revolution. Our world is becoming more intelligent and more connected by the minute, and ultimately will become intertwined with a vast Internet of Things (IoT), paving the way for our customers to do incredible things. This is why we created Dell Technologies. We have the products, services, talent and global scale to be a catalyst for change and guide customers, large and small, on their digital journey.”

Dell Technologies blends Dell’s go-to-market strength with small business and mid-market customers and EMC’s strength with large enterprises and stands as a market leader in many of the most important and high-growth areas of the $2trn IT market and a portfolio of more than 20,000 patents and applications.

 

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase, commented: “Financial services is one of the first-movers in embracing technology to better serve our customers, and the next wave of digitalisation continues a trend that’s been occurring my whole lifetime. As one of the world’s biggest users of Dell and EMC, we spend approximately $9bn a year on technology, including infrastructure as well as cloud computing, big data analytics and cybersecurity. We make sure we spend wisely and select our partners very carefully. I’ve known Michael Dell for 30 years. He’s top notch, ethical, and deeply cares about everyone he works with – both internally at his company and across the industry. I’m thrilled for Michael and the new company, and we are eager to see everything they create in the future.”

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce, added: “Salesforce’s partnership with Dell and EMC has been instrumental in pushing innovation across the industry. Michael is an incredible visionary and one of the most important leaders in our industry. He has been an amazing partner contributing to our success. Now with Dell Technologies, he is once again reshaping the technology industry.”

By  Manda Banda