Kathy Gibson at VMworld in Barcelona – Dell EMC today announced a strategic agreement with IBM to give Dell EMC customers access to VMware solutions on the IBM cloud.
As part of the new relationship, IBM has added Dell EMC infrastructure products into the IBM Cloud, and expands VMware solutions. Customers can now move workloads to the cloud while continuing to leverage the benefits of Dell EMC infrastructure and the VMware platform.
Today’s news builds on IBM’s long-term partnership with VMware, which helps organisations extend existing workloads to the cloud in hours, versus weeks or months. Signed one year ago, there are already 1 400 customers using IBM Cloud for VMware solutions on IBM’s global network of nearly 60 cloud data centres in 19 countries.
As part of today’s agreement, Dell EMC will begin by offering VMware vCenter Server on the IBM Cloud to its customers, which will enable them to rapidly extend on-premises data centre capacity into the public cloud, while taking advantage of their existing investments in VMware tooling and scripts and training.
“Dell EMC is laser-focused on helping customers quickly and successfully embrace their Digital Transformations. Dell EMC and IBM realise many customers will approach the challenge differently, but all are interested in realising the benefits of cloud-like efficiencies. Our relationship with IBM allows Dell’s Commercial customers the ability to quickly and easily extend their VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud,” says Armughan Ahmad, senior vice-president and GM: hybrid cloud and ready solutions at Dell EMC. “Customers will now be able to easily migrate enterprise applications to the single-tenant, IBM-hosted environment, and maintain the same level of control and visibility as if it were part of their own data centre.”
“Through the resale of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Dell EMC can offer their commercial customers a hybrid cloud choice with VMware offerings ‘as-a-Service’ as they make the cloud transition,” says Ajay Patel, senior vice-president and GM: cloud provider software business unit at VMware. “VMware Cloud Infrastructure enables customers to run, manage, connect and secure their applications across common operating environment, empowering them with a new level of IT agility and better economics.”
“Companies in every industry need fast and easy ways to deploy and move workloads to the cloud while not compromising security,” says Faiyaz Shahpurwala, GM of IBM Cloud. “This agreement makes it easier than ever for Dell’s thriving channel of commercial customers to access VMware’s capabilities on IBM Cloud. Now, these organisations can rapidly deploy and scale pre-configured solutions that optimise their existing IT investments, while using the public cloud to extract new insights and value.”
IBM Cloud for VMware solutions targets commercial customers looking for enhanced security. Customers can choose to run VMware solutions on dedicated bare metal servers, encrypt data at rest on attached storage and connect on-premises environments to IBM’s global network of cloud data centres.
Dell EMC offers its customers choice for their VMware environments – on-premises or in the IBM Cloud — to help central IT more quickly meet the increasing demands from their businesses and access IBM’s cloud-native services including cognitive and analytics.
Dell EMC will begin reselling VMware solutions on IBM Cloud to commercial customers beginning in the fourth quarter of 2017.