IT professionals and thought-leaders from around the world descended on Las Vegas, Nev., this week for the annual Microsoft Management Summit (MMS). Many of them came into the event with cloud computing on their minds, and, for many, the starting point was deploying a private cloud. Private clouds help speed application and IT service delivery while streamlining many of the operational tasks IT must manage to support the business or end user needs.
During the week I talked with dozens of attendees and many of them came to a profound conclusion about their private cloud strategy – they lacked the infrastructure needed to effectively deploy and manage a private cloud environment. Many noted inflexible legacy computing environments while others said they were reaching capacity with their current use of virtualization. Still, the interest in private clouds remained strong. For those in this situation, I recommended that they take a closer look at Dell’s vStart solution.
vStart is a pre-integrated infrastructure solution that enables IT and business stakeholders to accelerate application and IT service delivery. Leveraging Microsoft Hyper-V (as well as VMware vSphere) hypervisor solutions, organizations can gain just-in-time, business-ready infrastructure to support their key IT initiatives. With vStart, customers can focus on driving their business priorities – like deploying private clouds and enabling more rapid application delivery – not on building infrastructure.
Given MMS is focused on Microsoft’s systems management solutions, the upcoming release of System Center 2012 was a major theme of the event. Those I talked with were also pleased to learn that Dell will soon offer vStart for Microsoft Private Cloud, featuring System Center 2012. The combination of Dell vStart and System Center 2012 is designed to help customers:
- Accelerate Time-to-Value – by making virtual infrastructure productive for applications & cloud initiatives
- Drive Efficiency & Lower Risk – through pre-engineered, reliable infrastructure to reduce time & costs
- Enable Global Cloud Management – to deliver and manage applications and IT services across on-premise private, off-premise public and even hybrid models
- Deliver Future-Proof Scalability – by providing the foundation with robust & scalable data center infrastructur
Discovering that the underlying infrastructure was a key obstacle in preventing private cloud adoption and success seemed to be an epiphany for many of the people I met, and they were pleased to learn how Dell solves the problem of building infrastructure everyday while they might do it once every three to four years. Some felt their luck was about to change and that their private cloud was able to be deployed sooner than they thought.
If you missed any of the Dell news at MMS 2012, read Dell Introduces Enhanced Solutions for System Center 2012.