Information Technology (IT) departments are under significant pressure to deliver new applications to market, to innovate with technology to beat competitors, and to do it faster with +more choice. At the same time, there are requirements for stricter compliance, improved security, controlled costs, and increased efficiency. To solve these problems, the modern data center is trending towards converged and hyperconverged infrastructures, virtualization, and software-defined infrastructures and public and hybrid cloud solutions. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see Appendix B: Business IT challenges and trends.
The VMware vision of the modern data center is a software-defined, standardized architecture. It is a fully integrated hardware and software stack that is simple to manage, monitor, and operate. The VMware architecture for the software-defined data center (SDDC) empowers companies to run hybrid clouds and to leverage unique capabilities to deliver key outcomes that enable efficiency, agility, and security. The VMware SDDC is based on VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, and VMware NSX. It provides compute, storage, and networking virtualization to the SDDC, as well as the VMware Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite) for additional cloud management, self-service, automation, intelligent operations, and financial transparency. For more information see Appendix C: VMware SDDC .
VMware Cloud Foundation provides integrated cloud infrastructure (vSphere compute, vSAN storage, NSX networking, and security) and cloud management services (with the Aria Suite) to run many types of enterprise applications in both private and public environments. Applications range from traditional applications deployed as virtual machines and VMware Horizon virtual desktops, to Kubernetes-powered containerized cloud native applications. VMware Cloud Foundation helps break down the traditional administrative silos in data centers, merging compute, storage, network provisioning, and cloud management to facilitate end-to-end support for application deployment. VMware Cloud Foundation’s SDDC Manager component automates the life cycle management of a complete software-defined data center on standardized hyperconverged architecture. VMware Cloud Foundation can be deployed on premises on a broad range of supported hardware or consumed as a service in the public cloud. See Appendix D: VMware Cloud Foundation for more information about the native software platform architecture, key features and capabilities, SDDC Manager, resource management with workload domains, support for dual-region and multiple availability zones, and path to the hybrid cloud details.
Dell Technologies shares VMware’s vision of the modern data center and extends that to the infrastructure. For customers that choose VMware as the primary technology for modernizing their data center or building a multicloud IT environment, Dell offers an accelerated path to the VMware SDDC by jointly developing a fully automated and turnkey cloud infrastructure platform.
VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VxRail delivers a simple and direct path to the hybrid cloud and Kubernetes at cloud scale while allowing customers to maintain flexibility of networking and topology. VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail builds on native VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities. It provides additional unique integration features that are jointly engineered by Dell and VMware that no other VMware Cloud Foundation infrastructure offer can provide. These features simplify, streamline, and automate SDDC operations from deployment through Day 2 operations (including support and serviceability capabilities).
