Dell Aims To Make It Easier To Deploy, Manage Hybrid Clouds

Dell is introducing a range of new and upgraded products aimed at VMware environments and that are part of the tech vendor’s push to help organizations embrace hybrid clouds.

Company officials announced the offerings this week during the VMworld 2015 show in San Francisco, saying they will help businesses that are looking to bring some of the workloads and data that they have housed in public clouds back into the private clouds that run in the data center.

Private cloud

Dell is building out its enterprise portfolio to give enterprises the tools, services and support they need to build out their private cloud environments and manage applications across public, private and managed clouds, according to Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell.

Dell’s longstanding partnership with VMware is an important part of that effort, Ganthier said in a statement.

“Several studies have shown the clear customer value and accelerating rate of repatriating previously public cloud only deployments to hybrid cloud environments,” he said. “Dell’s innovations coupled with our ongoing and extensive VMware partnership enable our joint customers to not only achieve the above but also deliver both business results and outcomes.”

Dell is among a number of vendors—such as Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo—to unveil new offerings this week to support VMware environment. One move Dell made was launching Active System Manager 8.1.1, which will now integrate with VMware’s vRealize Suite, its cloud management platform. Through this integration, Active System Manager customers can now integrate physical and virtual environments. They also can enable dynamic cloud provisioning within the vRealize Suite, officials said.

Active System Manager also is a central technology for the technology preview of Dell’s Hybrid Cloud Platform Reference Architecture with VMware vRealize. The reference architecture is designed to accelerate customer deployments of VMware-based private and hybrid clouds.

In addition, Dell is updating its Engineered Solutions for VMware’s EVO:Rail converged infrastructure portfolio. The updates to the Horizon and Infrastructure editions are designed to increase density and performance while driving down costs of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, according to Dell officials. The solutions are built on the PowerEdge C6320 server, which is part of the 13^th generation of systems, and will offer a 60 percent to 80 percent increase in density—from 250 to 440 users for virtual desktop and application workloads—while driving down the initial cost per seat from $400 to $210.

A new high-performance configuration can offer even greater density, officials said.

Dell is also rolling out the latest edition of its thin client operating system, Wyse ThinOS 8.1, which is designed for Wyse thin clients and can work with VMware Horizon. There are new security capabilities, including a zero attack surface that officials said makes it immune to viruses and malware, as well as improved wired and wireless authentication features. Other features include support for USB 3.0 connectivity to an array of peripherals, such as keyboards, mice, Web cams, headsets, printers and monitors.  Managing multiple Wyse thin clients also is made easier either through a file server, Wyse Device Manager, for on-premises deployments, or through Cloud Client Manager for cloud environments.

The latest version of Wyse Cloud Client Manager, release 8, can now manage thin clients running Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Standard operating system and SUSE Linux, as well as those with Wyse ThinOS.

Originally published on eWeek.