Cloud. There is no more popular word in the English language today being used across the IT industry. Cloud technologies create an elastic, scalable environment to deliver IT services. IT organizations of all shapes and sizes are taking a close look at their opportunities for cloud computing models given increasing demands from their businesses and end users. And the first step on this journey customers are taking to cloud models is private cloud.
In December 2011 at Gartner’s Data Center Conference, a poll was taken about customer’s pursuit of a private cloud computing strategy – with 80% of organizations saying they will be pursuing a private cloud by 2014. I challenge you to find a hardware or software trend with this much interest.
However, despite this incredible interest many organizations don’t know where to start.
Dell has been talking with hundreds of customers about their private cloud strategy and overall journey to the cloud. Universally, IT teams are reviewing their models for delivering and fulfilling business demands for applications and IT services. In response, we found five recurring points that were top of mind:
- Leverage the infrastructure already in place to conserve capital expenditures
- Continue deploying virtualization as the foundation for greater flexibility
- Preserve existing investments in management solutions
- Promote freedom of choice for infrastructure components
- Evaluate converged infrastructure solutions to speed time-to-market
In response to these evolving needs, Dell has a single strategy for enabling private clouds that uses two approaches to delivery – giving you innovative options for addressing these new IT demands:
Virtual Integrated System (VIS)
First, Dell enables organizations to leverage existing infrastructure to improve the delivery of applications and IT services across mixed physical and virtual environments. Customers are achieving dramatic results in being able to:
- Drive increased business agility and deliver IT as-a-service
- Increase automation and enable rapid workload deployment
- Optimize converged infrastructure and operations across physical and virtual environments
With VIS, Dell is helping customer balance the need for greater agility, while gaining efficiency and balancing the economics of on-premise private clouds and off-premise public cloud options.
vStart for Dell Private Cloud
Building infrastructure is a necessary part of every IT organization. Working with our customers, we concluded that each one saw their infrastructure as a means to an end – to support new application workloads and IT projects like enabling private cloud. It was normal for them to spend weeks purchasing and procuring the components, more weeks to rack, stack and cable them, and more weeks, still, to get it into production. Even for good teams, this could mean two months just to stand up a new application. Dell has solved this hundreds of times a week while our customers might do it once every three to four years.
In response, Dell now offers vStart, a pre-integrated infrastructure solution that enables IT and business stakeholders to accelerate application and IT service delivery. Leveraging VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor solutions, organizations can gain just-in-time, business-ready infrastructure to support their key IT initiatives. With vStart, you can focus on driving your business priorities, not on building infrastructure.
Today, Dell is bringing to market a new solution to accelerate your journey to the cloud. The vStart for Dell Private Cloud solution enables greater business agility through pre-integrated infrastructure and automated self-service delivery.
The solution includes servers, storage, networking and cloud management software, thus eliminating long, drawn-out processes of architecting, building and integrating virtual infrastructure. Powered by Dell’s VIS Creator, vStart for Dell Private Cloud provides many advanced cloud management capabilities out-of-the-box and ready-to-use. Organizations can gain greater business agility to:
- Accelerate Time-to-Value – by making virtual infrastructure productive for applications and cloud initiatives
- Drive Efficiency and Lower Risk – through pre-engineered, reliable infrastructure to reduce time and costs
- Enable Global Cloud Management – to deliver and manage applications and IT services across on-premise private, off-premise public and even hybrid models.
- Deliver Future-Proof Scalability – by providing the foundation with robust & scalable data center infrastructure
Dell has listened to our customers and is delivering innovative and practical solutions to enable the journey to the cloud. With our VIS portfolio and vStart for Dell Private Cloud solutions, we are helping organizations transform their data centers to meet new business and customer demands, helping them achieve more, deliver real results faster and to maximize efficiency.
