Dell EMC Expands Microsoft Support, Delivering Innovations Across Cloud and Converged Infrastructure

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, announced broadened support of Microsoft Corp. environments with Azure Services, Validated Systems for Exchange and SQL, as well as customer momentum for the company’s Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft.

Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft

The services and validated systems can enable customers to increase business agility, improve efficiencies and lower costs with customizable hybrid cloud and infrastructure solutions.

“For more than 30 years, Dell EMC and Microsoft have focused on delivering best-in-class, innovative solutions that span the entire Microsoft product portfolio to organizations all over the world,” said Jim Ganthier, SVP, validated solutions organization, converged platforms solution division, Dell EMC. “Together, we are working to both simplify and accelerate customers’ journey to the cloud, helping them build individualized cloud solutions that are future-proofed for business and IT transformation.“

Through this alliance, the company announced availability of a suite of Azure Cloud Services, which enables customers to adopt hybrid cloud services, increasing efficiencies and extending the capabilities of their IT infrastructure. These cloud services are hosted, managed and delivered from Azure. Backed by the firm’s SLAs, 24/7 tech support and service health monitoring, customers pay only for the services consumed and without long-term contracts.

These services include:

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 cost savings while protecting data running in VMs 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 BC solution – utilizes multiple Azure services delivered with the company’s consulting, provisioning, break/fix support, and single-source pay-as-you-go billing. This solution brings enterprise BC to small businesses by making it accessible and simpler without having to design, build, or maintain it on their own.

Hybrid cloud system for Microsoft gains momentum, help businesses
to simplify cloud delivery, management and scale
Since introduced in October 2015, customers from financial services to technology providers have selected the company’s Hybrid Cloud System (DHCS) for Microsoft to power their hybrid cloud environments. These customers are benefiting from an 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:

Glarner Kantonalbank, an digital Swiss bank, wanted to upgrade its already successful hybrid cloud. It chose the DHCS, installed with the help of Dell EMC Deployment Services, in the first rollout of its kind in Europe. As a result, it can expand and become a full service provider of digital services for other banks.
CGI Group Inc., the fifth largest independent information technology and business process services firm in the world, offers private cloud deployments with a customized approach to meet client requirements. With DHCS, the company improves time-to-value for clients by simplifying deployments, reducing risks, and cutting deployment time by up to 50%.
PeeringOne, a Malaysian-based cloud provider, needed to meet growing customer demand for cloud services and guarantee reliability and performance. The modular scale-out architecture of the DHCS enabled PeeringOne to minimize capital expenditure and leverage cost savings to ensure compelling customer price points.
Pulsant, a UK-based cloud hosting company, increasingly required a hybrid cloud based on Microsoft technology. After running a proof of concept, the company deployed two DHCS appliances and expects its new hybrid cloud offerings to drive up to $2 million in new business.

Validated systems drive business intelligence and collaboration efforts
Company’s converged infrastructure leadership spans tested and validated reference architectures, solution bundles, validated systems and turnkey, engineered systems for a variety of use cases. The firm’s converged infrastructure portfolio covers the ‘build’ to ‘buy’ continuum, so customers can adopt key technologies, such as flash, software-defined storage and scale-out architectures purpose built for wherever they are in their digital transformation journey.

In support of its service-defined infrastructure approach, the company unveiled two additions to its Validated Systems portfolio:

Validated System for SQL is designed for performance, cost savings and scalability for future needs. It allows customers to process in-memory online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads up 30 times faster with SQL Server 2016, as well as consolidate sprawling legacy databases with the PowerEdge R830 for a data warehousing solution with performance and TCO.

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

These Validated Systems can be configured, quoted and ordered in minutes, while lifecycle management tools allow customers to easily deploy, scale and update systems.

Mike Oreno, system administrator, ARIIX, said: “With Microsoft Azure Backup services from Dell EMC, we are saving more than 65% compared to our previous solution. Rather than waiting for a report at the end of the month, we can see exactly how much data was backed up each night. This insight saves time and helps us be more proactive supporting the business.“

Ralf Luchsinger, CIO, Glarner Kantonalbank, said: “We estimate that the Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft solution will have paid for itself within a year as a result of the team being able to take a lot of services back in-house that we’d previously outsourced. Additionally, we can be creative rather than reactive with our hybrid cloud from Dell EMC. We’re in a good place to stay ahead of the competition.“

Dimitris Karabinis, architect, solutions, U.S. global infrastructure services and onshore delivery, CGI Group, Inc., said: “The Dell Hybrid Cloud System is helping us prepare for whatever the future may hold with its extraordinary scalability and ease of installation. It enables us to focus less on building and maintaining infrastructure and more on delivering the high-value services our clients need going forward.“

Wong Chee Voon, MD, PeeringOne, said: “We can offer customers in Malaysia the full value of cloud IT for improving business performance while reducing costs using our Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft. Since deploying the system, we have realized 120% sales increase through multiple cloud architectures and maximized returns with implementation time cut by 80%.“

Stuart Nielsen-Marsh, product manager, Microsoft cloud services, Pulsant, said: “We are excited about the potential applications of the Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft. This is just the beginning of an exciting journey into the hybrid cloud for us and our customers, and we couldn’t have better partners than Dell EMC and Microsoft on board.“

Aziz Benmalek, VP, WW cloud and hosting services, Microsoft, said: “Dell and Microsoft have a long history of working together to speed customers’ journey to hybrid cloud. We are pleased to extend our alliance with Dell EMC to help even more customers leverage hybrid cloud on their terms with Microsoft Cloud Services.“

Availability:

Azure Backup, Azure Dev/Test Labs and Validated System for Exchange are available.
Azure BC Solution has planned availability in October 2016.
Validated System for SQL has planned availability in early 2017.

Resources:
Dell Boomi announces connectivity support for the Cortana Intelligence Suite on the Microsoft Azure platform
Dell unveils its mobile thin clients yet with enterprise-class performance and security
EMC Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft web page
Microsoft Azure Cloud Services from Dell EMC web page
Validated System for Microsoft Exchange web page