Dell Technologies Advances Storage and Data Protection for VMware Environments

Dell Technologies and VMware have a long history of bringing new solutions to market together, delivering immense value to organizations of all sizes. As businesses and users rely more heavily on applications and an increased need for business resiliency, VMware and Dell Technologies are announcing a host of new options that customers can leverage to modernize their applications and infrastructure. These solutions will allow organizations to simplify VMware management, automate data protection, and accelerate operational efficiencies.

PowerMax SRDF Now Supports VMware SRM with vVols

As customers modernize their infrastructure and move from a hardware-centric storage approach to an application-centric approach, Dell EMC PowerMax with vVols provides an enterprise-grade platform for running virtual volumes at scale with the world’s fastest storage array¹. Customers can now leverage VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to initiate automated replication with PowerMax SRDF/A to orchestrate VM movement between sites and maximize availability for mission-critical applications. Combining the gold standard in replication with VMware’s Storage Strategy, SRM with SRDF, accelerates the IT modernization journey for our customers and provides peace of mind across the VMware environment.

“Customers look to VMware and Dell Technologies to provide a platform that supports their mission critical workloads. VMware’s Site Recovery Manager integrated with vVols is now being delivered on Dell EMC PowerMax with the Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) – the recognized leader in enterprise-grade storage replication. Dell Technologies and VMware customers can use VMware’s continuously availability mechanisms together with Dell EMC high-performance arrays to maximize the availability of their mission-critical environments,” Lee Caswell, VP, Marketing, Cloud Platforms BU, VMware.

PowerProtect Data Manager Provides Modern Protection 

Dell Technologies and VMware are helping customers change evolve their infrastructure to support modern applications with consistent operations and increased choice across hybrid cloud architectures. Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager brings enterprise data protection for the VMware Tanzu portfolio, on-premises and in the cloud. With VMware running Kubernetes everywhere, enabling the protection of Tanzu is essential for business operations. Additionally, the orchestration that PowerProtect Data Manager provides is critical to the management of the total solution. PowerProtect Data Manager provides protection for Tanzu Kubernetes clusters in vSphere with Kubernetes, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated (aka TKGI).

Policy-Driven Management: Simplify and Automate VM Protection

We are dedicated to introducing joint innovations that help customers modernize their infrastructure, simplify and automate data protection and maximize existing investment. New PowerProtect Data Manager integrations make it the only solution to provide native vCenter Storage Policy-based Management integration for VM protection. This allows VI admins to save time by using well-known workflows from within their vSphere environment to assign data protection policies. Additionally, this latest release of PowerProtect Data Manager offers a VMware-certified solution to protect the VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure layer.

Enhanced Protection of Mission-Critical VMs

Dell Technologies is previewing a new feature in PowerProtect Data Manager that will eliminate the need to pause a VM during backup. With this feature, large, mission critical VMs can be backed up without business disruption using snapshot and data movement technologies developed by Dell Technologies. Customers who previously had ‘unprotectable’ VMs due to availability concerns impacting their business will soon be able to protect their VMs without experiencing any inactivity.

Dell EMC ObjectScale Brings Object Access to vSphere Environments

Finally, building on VMware’s recent announcement of the vSAN Data Persistence platform, Dell Technologies is previewing its next generation object storage platform, Dell EMC ObjectScale, currently in early access. ObjectScale will empower developers to provision S3-compatible, cloud-scale storage for modern stateful applications on demand. By enabling object storage—a critical component of cloud-native application architectures—to be deployed directly through vSphere’s infrastructure management experience, VMware is equipping customers with the tools to deliver modern application experiences and bridge the gap between development and IT. VMware customers can now deploy storage technology which helps them capture and manage all data types, better serving their development partners and ultimately their end users.

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¹ Based on Dell EMC internal analysis of published bandwidth of the Dell EMC PowerMax 8000 versus competitive mainstream arrays, July 2019.

Travis Vigil

About the Author: Travis Vigil

Travis Vigil is Senior Vice President leading Portfolio and Product Management for Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG). He and his team are responsible for Dell’s Server, Storage, Data Protection, CI/HCI, Networking and Solutions businesses. He has over 20 years of Product Management, Marketing and Business Operations experience with technology companies including Intel and Dell. In previous roles at Dell, he served as Senior Vice President for Storage and Data Protection Product Management, and Senior Vice President for Business Operations focused on Dell’s Server, Storage and Networking Businesses. He has a B.S. from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.