Dell EMC Says ‘Everyone’ Will Move To Hybrid Cloud. But Will They Really?

Merger benefits

Dell EMC is pitching two paths for the hybrid cloud. The first is an integrated approach that involves hyperconverged infrastructure.

One of the first tangible benefits of the merger is the updated VxRail appliance range, which are built for VMware, are now powered by Dell’s PowerEdge servers. Dell EMC claims they offer 40 percent more CPU performance for the price, can support more than 200 virtual machines and are available for less than $50,000.

“Many of you could run your entire business on one of these machines,” quipped Goulden.

Even still, the VXRail can be built out using VxRack, which scales to thousands of nodes and 10,000s of virtual machines.

The second approach sees Dell EMC provide the building blocks. Dell EMC World saw the debut of new storage products and Elastic Cloud Storage 3 (ECS3).

Dell EMC said that no matter what approach its customers elect to take, its combined portfolio will support them.

“Whatever level you want to start your enterprise cloud app at, we have the solution for you,” said Goulden. “We’re starting to combine the Dell and EMC portfolios. But tech is advancing … and as your partner we have a commitment. That is to innovate in the entire technology stack.”

Read More: Dell EMC World is the show that outgrew its hometown

What does it mean?

But will all companies move to hybrid infrastructure? One expert said that although EMC and Dell were a natural fit, it was not immediately obvious that hybrid would be the answer for everyone.

“There are good synergies in their product lines: EMC have the converged appliances but no servers and Dell is the clear leader in term of server revenues,” Sid Nag, analyst at Gartner, told TechWeekEurope in Austin.

“What I heard [at Dell EMC World] is they are really going for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and power it in a new way.

“That’s all good, but my biggest trepidation is the cost of ownership for HCI when compared to doing the same thing in the cloud. For an enterprise decision maker point of view, that’s very challenging. There’s going to be a segment of the enterprise that’s going to stay public, they’re never going to build data centres.”

Nag suggested this was curious given Dell’s heritage of serving small businesses and noted that in the infancy of public cloud there was a significant spike in demand as organisations sought to take advantage of the technology. But this peaked, he said, because IT started to pay more attention to which applications were being moved.

He anticipates a similar surge for private cloud but the biggest issue he had with Dell EMC’s strategy is that, from what it described at Dell EMC World, its definition of the hybrid cloud is essentially private cloud.

“By [Dell EMC’s] definition, hybrid cloud is going to grow,” Nag argued. “What is their on-ramp strategy for moving from private to public cloud? That’s true hybrid. If they want to be a true trusted hybrid provider, they need a strategy.”

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