One company I have started following closely –– is Dell Technologies*.

At the start of the recently-concluded MS Ignite event in Atlanta, I feared that Dell would be so much in the throes of integrating with their latest acquisition, EMC Corp, that they – Dell – wouldn’t be in a position to do, or offer much.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that much was going on, and they had the following to offer.

Their initial bang was with the Microsoft Cloud, Azure.

For Azure, Dell announced the following new offerings:

Azure Backup – a flexible, secure, scalable backup solution in Microsoft’s cloud management portfolio. With no capital investment and consumption-based pricing, this service delivers significant cost savings while protecting data running in virtual machines or on physical servers, as well as in Azure.

Azure Dev/Test Labs – a service that allows developers and testers to create and provision Windows and Linux environments quickly using reusable templates and pre-provisioned environments in Azure. As a result, customers can minimize time and waste, control costs and scale-up load testing efficiently.

Azure Business Continuity Solution – utilizes multiple Azure services delivered with Dell EMC consulting, provisioning, break/fix support, and single-source pay-as-you-go billing. This solution brings enterprise-class business continuity to small businesses by making it accessible and radically simpler without having to design, build, or maintain it on their own.

The rather interesting about the above services is that they are Pay/Go Dell services built atop Azure, maintained by Dell EMC staffers, and without typical long-term contractual commitments.

Another offering that caught my eye was the Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft.

This solution enables Dell customers to power their hybrid cloud environments by benefiting from the industry’s first integrated, hybrid cloud solution that offers simplified, automated deployment and maintenance capabilities and unparalleled hybrid cloud governance, control, and policy-based automation for Azure with an optional, unique payment solution to reduce investment risk:

Converged? Converged. CONVERGED!!!
Unless you have been living in Middle Earth, you must know about converged systems**.

Here, Dell is delivering some new converged systems to leverage the Microsoft stack. Two new solutions were added to the Dell portfolio:

a) Dell EMC Validated System for Microsoft SQL is designed for superior performance, significant cost savings and scalability for future needs. It allows customers to process in-memory online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads up 30 times faster with Microsoft SQL Server 2016, as well as consolidate sprawling legacy databases with the latest Dell EMC PowerEdge R830 servers for a modern data warehousing solution with exceptional performance and total cost of ownership

b) The Dell EMC Validated System for Microsoft Exchange is a pre-architected and validated datacenter solution for email workloads. The highly scalable system delivers faster time to value by shortening the design, delivery and configuration time for Exchange Server 2016. Designed for exceptional scalability, this converged system lowers cost of ownership through resource consolidation, optimized storage design and efficient system management built on the Dell EMC PowerEdge R730xd server.

As I am informed, these new Dell EMC Validated Systems can be configured, quoted and ordered in minutes, while lifecycle management tools allow customers to easily deploy, scale and update systems.

Additionally, the information below was imparted:

• Software Defined Data Center / Cloud with Windows Server 2016 - Key for success in 2016 and beyond – Windows Server 2016 with Storage Spaces Direct on Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers
• Microsoft Azure Stack – On-Premises cloud – seamless interface with frictionless connection to Azure
• Cloud Enablement with Windows Server 2016 – Highly refactored the Nano Server Windows Server 2016 deployment option for born in-the-cloud applications with small OS footprint
• Server Management – Dell EMC’s OpenManage Integration Suite for Microsoft System Center for seamless, agent-free server management
• Microsoft SQL Server 2016 – Offers real time insights across transactional and analytical data, with a secure, scalable database platform from advanced analytics to in-memory performance and industry leading OLTP. It is equally important to operate all your big data operations on an infrastructure that reduces your TCO, delivers high performance that is secure and seamlessly manageable using your existing, familiar tools.
• Database and analytics platforms – Dell EMC redefines database and analytics platforms for mission critical compute, storage and networking by combining the best efficiencies of x86 compute platform with flash storage and high performing network capabilities to meet the demands of next generation applications.

The graphic below is a handy cheat sheet.

1. Thanks to @JimGant, @SarahVatDell, and the Social Media team there.
2. I must read up on the Dell Validated Systems Portfolio.

© 2002 – 2016, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited