Dell Technologies World: Take Control of Cloud Strategy With Data First Approach From Dell EMC

By Joe CaraDonna, VP, CTO cloud, Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies

Take Control of your Cloud Strategy with a Data First Approach

The cloud can be a powerful tool for optimizing business outcomes, which is why our customers are actively mapping out their cloud strategies.

When embarking on the journey to the cloud, you must carefully consider how your data is managed – as data is increasingly becoming the most valuable asset of your business. A cloud strategy therefore requires a data first approach, where you can ensure your data is: secured, protected, available where and when you need it, delivered at the performance levels required by your applications, and within compliance of your company policies.

Dell Technologies, Inc. is focused on being your partner on your multi-cloud journey with cloud enabled infrastructure. Today, we introduce a host of new and enhanced cloud capabilities, designed to help make the cloud work for your business and data.

First, we announce Cloud Storage Services which delivers Dell EMC storage as a public cloud service for DR as well as many multi-cloud use cases like analytics, test/dev and more. It frees you from system management, while getting the benefits of enterprise-grade data security, performance, capacity, replication, and availability in the public cloud. The flexibility of this offering allows to optimize cost, while keeping in control of your data.

DR in cloud
Secondary data centers have relatively high overhead. You’re paying for real estate, power, cooling, compute, network, storage gear, and people to manage it. The gear just sits there idling – waiting for an unforeseeable event. Which is why customers are looking to public cloud for DR, but to get it right you must cover management of applications and the data, for failover and failback.

Cloud Storage Services enable organizations running VMware, Inc. environments to implement an enterprise-grade DR solution, using VMware Cloud on AWS as the secondary site. VMware Site Recovery Manager along with native replication of the company’s storage arrays enable automation of DR operations. This makes it easier and more affordable to achieve lower RPOs and RTOs and provides complete operational consistency from on premises to the cloud.

We also have options for customers who want their DR solution to leverage AWS, GCP or Azure. With Cloud Storage Services, customers no longer need to maintain a secondary site. They gain the flexibility and economics of the public cloud, while maintaining control of their data with enterprise-grade firm’s torage.

Multi-cloud data services with zero gravity
Multi-cloud data services give you the freedom to choose your cloud and just as importantly, change your mind. One constant we can all rely on is change, and your cloud strategy needs the flexibility to adapt:

• What if your business requirements change?

• What if the economics of running your applications change?

• Are you locked in?

In addition, data sharing across clouds is becoming an area of interest for customers:

• What if different departments of your business want to operate on the same data sets, but are using different applications in different clouds?

• What if you want to share data sets with your customers with each using different clouds?

• Are you copying data sets to multiple clouds?

Data has gravity, where it takes time, resources and money to move it. Cloud Storage Services offers multi-cloud access to data allowing you to leverage multiple clouds and switch between them without having to move the data. That’s zero data gravity. You can avoid vendor lock-in by keeping data independent of the cloud, and you do not have to worry about high egress charges, migration risk, or time required to move data.

Infrastructure insight in palm of your hand
The company’s CloudIQ is a cloud-based application that delivers insight, monitoring and analytics about your storage environment – empowering IT specialists to report, predict, and prevent problems. You can access it from anywhere, through any web browser or via the CloudIQ mobile app.

CloudIQ now supports our core primary storage portfolio – Unity, PowerMax, XtremIO and SC, and we’ve expanded it beyond the storage stack to include support for VMware and the company’s Connectrix. We also plan to expand to Isilon and PowerVault by the end of the year. Users now have broader data center visibility through a single, cohesive portal with insights ranging from object level, to storage, to the network.

CloudIQ continues to grow smarter with new advanced analytics for capacity forecasting, performance impact analysis, noisy neighbor detection and storage reclaim. Plus, the re-designed interface provides users with a simpler, more streamlined experience. In fact, CloudIQ adoption has grown 3x over the past year alone. ^[1]

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Clarity through clouds
As your data continues to grow and become more distributed, spanning clouds, it becomes important to have the right tools to manage it all.

Dell EMC ClarityNow enables organizations to tag, locate, access and manage data ins – across file and object storage, in the data center or in the cloud. It also offers self-service capabilities to find, use, and move files to the appropriate storage tier. It is helping customers take control of massive amounts of unstructured data today.

Data first approach to cloud
The cloud can be a powerful tool for optimizing your business, and with data increasingly becoming your most valuable asset, your cloud strategy must take a data first approach.

The introduction of our Cloud Storage Services and data management capabilities demonstrates how Dell is focused on being your partner on your multi-cloud journey. By working with you to understand what you are trying to do with cloud, we can apply a data first approach, and deliver cloud enabled solutions designed to help make the cloud work for your business and your data.

^[1] Based on Dell internal analysis, April 2019