Cloud Ready with Dell: From vStart to vCloud

Written by : Deepak Kanwar and Stephen Spector

As organizations continue to move up the virtualization maturity ladder, they are looking at private clouds to bring greater agility and efficiency to their environment. By pooling IT assets and exposing them via Infrastructure as a Service to their employees/customers, private cloud can quickly enhance employee productivity and experience. Instead of waiting for days, authorized IT users can now get access to IT assets in a matter of minutes. As their needs change, these users can quickly ramp up or ramp down their capacity bringing unprecedented agility to the organization.  Unfortunately, building private clouds can be challenging. Organizations can spend months just readying the infrastructure to underpin the private cloud as they go through the process of design/architect, test, procure and configure. Implementing cloud management software on top takes additional time and may require a different set of skills. As their needs grow often these organizations realize that their solutions do not scale well especially for multi-vendor solutions.

With Dell’s vStart for Private Cloud solution, these challenges are minimized if not eliminated. Delivered pre-engineered and pre-built and with included deployment services the vStart for Dell Private Cloud allows organizations to take advantage of their own private clouds in days not months. Built upon Dell’s pre-engineered and pre-built virtualization infrastructure solution, vStart and Dell’s cloud management solution, VIS Creator, vStart for Dell Private Cloud enables advanced private cloud capabilities such as sprawl control, showback and out of the box audit capabilities. The solution is designed to scale to easily accommodate growing needs, the infrastructure can be scaled vertically, by adding additional compute or storage capacity or horizontally, by adding additional racks. Companies looking to leverage the public cloud for its (supposedly) infinitesimal on-demand capacity from either a tactical perspective – cloud bursting or from a strategic perspective where parts of their workload continue in the public clouds can easily do so through the hybrid model. vStart for Dell Private cloud continues to be the in-house cloud as they reach out to vCloud for their additional needs.

Having a complete, private cloud up and running presents the customer with additional services from Dell via our public/hybrid secure enterprise class vCloud with Datacenter Services. Using the same internal management technology, customers can burst workloads directly to the Dell vCloud using the VMware vCloud Connector, a simple application download from VMware. Moving workloads from the private cloud to the Dell hybrid vCloud with a simple drag and drop gives customers instant access to unlimited compute resources to meet their external or internal customers’ needs.

Customers are also provided cloud security in Dell vCloud using Dell SecureWorks and VMware vShield to protect critical IT assets and data within the cloud is encrypted using Trend Micro’s industry leading encryption technology. In addition, global load balancing allows customers the flexibility to move workloads amongst the global collection of Dell vClouds or within the various servers within a specific Dell vCloud site. 

As you can see, Dell has the cloud technology in place to take customers from basic virtualization to private clouds to public/hybrid clouds using the same management utilities and without the need to retrain your workforce.  Having a single cloud supplier enabling end-to-end cloud capabilities is an advantage Dell offers to our large and growing virtualization and customer base. The simplicity and power from the vStart to vCloud offering sets Dell apart in the marketplace.

About the Author: Stephen Spector