Dell EMC and Microsoft Target Hybrid Cloud Market

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Enterprises are flocking to technologies that help them capitalize on the cloud’s scalability and comparative ease of management while maintaining the data security, privacy and compliance standards that govern how they conduct business.

In fact, nearly 80 percent of large organizations (1,000 or more employees) “already have a hybrid cloud strategy and over half [51.4 percent] are using both public and private cloud infrastructure,” Kevin Gray, director, product marketing, Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud Platforms, told Datamation, citing data from an IDC survey of 1,000 midsized to large organizations.

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The study, sponsored by Dell EMC, also found that an additional 29 percent of large businesses expect public cloud and private cloud infrastructure within a year. Besides lower costs, the top reasons businesses are moving their application workloads to the cloud include the public cloud’s globe-spanning reach (27 percent), ease of use and management (23 percent) and rapid provisioning (18 percent).

“We see a clear market,” Gray said, noting that his company’s longtime technology partner, “Microsoft is the fastest growing cloud provider.” Indeed, Microsoft cloud revenues are growing by leaps and bounds as the company and rivals like IBM and Google attempt to catch up to the undisputed market leader Amazon Web Service.

Gray and his group view “the whole azure ecosystem as an opportunity for Dell EMC,” explaining why the IT hardware goliath has teamed with software and cloud computing giant Microsoft, on a line of converged hybrid cloud systems called Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack.

Azure Stack is a hybrid-cloud software platform for on-premises servers that essentially enables businesses to bring Microsoft Azure’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) technologies into their data centers. Azure Stack will soon be generally available bundled in integrated systems from Cisco, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, and of course, Dell EMC.

Expected to start shipping in the second half of 2017, Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack is built using PowerEdge R730XD servers and PowerConnect switches. In a blog post today, John Barnhart, ‎technical marketing engineer at Dell EMC’s Microsoft Cloud Solutions, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, noted that customers can take Azure Stack for a spin before the solution is generally available.

“For Microsoft Azure customers who want to begin their hybrid cloud journey today using Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack the place to start is with the ‘single-node’ PowerEdge R630 for development and testing,” Barnhart wrote. The hardware runs Azure Stack Technical Preview 3 from Microsoft, enabling early adopters to familiarize themselves with the system.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.