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At Zettabyte Content, we’ve worked within the world of data center infrastructure for over fifteen years. We’ve seen it all—a shift from “one application one server” through virtualization, converged, hyperconverged, and cloud. The latest shift toward cloud extends the connection between public cloud capability into on-premise datacenters.
Our view is that every shift, especially this one, though necessary to meet business and service delivery goals, breaks old approaches to data center infrastructure. Rip and replace upgrades cause too much disruption. Complex management impedes agility. Resource overprovisioning drives up OpEx. And transformational workloads – AI, analytics, microservices – require the performance advantages of new technologies, including FPGAs, NVMe drives, and GPUs, that can’t be stranded behind a single server.
The world demands the agility of cloud – seamless, on demand expansion, workload movement, data migration, and resource allocation. Most vendors understand that old hardware can’t deliver on these promises. What’s needed is a new approach to hardware—where hardware is more cloud-like than ever before. The latest shift toward cloud extends the connection between public cloud capability into on-premise datacenters. Our view is that every shift, especially this one, though necessary to meet business and service delivery goals, breaks old approaches to data center infrastructure.
The on-premise world demands that infrastructure functions more like the cloud. Cloud-like Infrastructure:
To meet these criteria, Dell EMC developed the PowerEdge MX. They call it kinetic infrastructure, and their design works to add responsive and adaptive capabilities so organizations can evolve toward shifting needs. Built for an unpredictable world filled with emerging IT innovation, it aims to give customers a straightforward path to future-ready, composable, disaggregated infrastructure that’s a perfect fit for the flexibility of cloud. With it, organizations can accelerate their shift toward:
Physically, the PowerEdge MX is a modular design that’s built for simple, scalable software defined data centers and hybrid cloud. It offers organizations a flexible way to optimize designs by integrating compute, storage, and networking into a 7U chassis.
Dell EMC’s PowerEdge MX offers capabilities important for cloud-like infrastructure:
But the basic hardware, in a sense, isn’t the point. The PowerEdge MX offers a streamlined solution for modular infrastructure that delivers operational benefits beyond the hardware. Unlike most platforms, it includes a single user interface and comprehensive full RESTful set of APIs, including support for Project Redfish, to power a future of composability for compute, storage, networking, and emerging resources.v It’s been proven to scale full lifecycle management to over 500 nodes in 62 chassis on 7 continents in one console.v It cuts time to view inventory and firmware by 77%.vi
PowerEdge MX gives organizations a new way to move from planning to widespread implementation of large-scale IT transformation by making investments in agile, disruptive infrastructure.
Organizations of all sizes can experience:
But there can’t be a cloud without a cloud stack, and until recently, on-premise cloud stacks came with issues that limited widespread adoption. Public cloud providers gained market share quickly by building end to end stacks, virtualizing compute, storage, and networking, while maintaining relative ease of use. Unfortunately, on-premise cloud stacks didn’t succeed at striking the right balance between feature richness and simplicity. Some offered many features, at the cost of intolerable complexity. Others were relatively simple, but their feature sets couldn’t keep up with the innovation driven by the primary public cloud providers.
Now, with VMware Cloud Foundation™, organizations have a comprehensive hybrid cloud stack that streamlines deployment, makes management easy, allows organizations to leverage their VMware expertise, and comes with a robust set of capabilities that extend the value hybrid cloud delivers.
To put it another way, the right hybrid cloud is an operating model built on tested, proven, mature technologies that support superior business and user experiences. Organizations get value from a hybrid cloud when it offers three pillars of capability that simplify, accelerate, and enable traditional workloads and modern apps while letting them co-exist on a single platform.
These three pillars of capability are:
Organizations that choose VMware Cloud Foundation gain all these capabilities and many more. Building on VMware Cloud Foundation ensures a:
VMware Cloud Foundation enables organizations to craft a multi-site hyperconverged infrastructure that’s completely software defined and integrated from a suite of market leading, field proven building blocks that offer the most advanced path to hybrid cloud. With it, organizations can build on their VMware expertise, and craft their future-proofed infrastructure on industry leading virtualization, shared storage, software defined networks, self-service application provisioning, intelligent management, and lifecycle automation.
All these capabilities, based on VMware technologies including vSphere (compute), vSAN (storage), NSX (networking and security), and vRealize® Suite (cloud management), Cloud Foundation delivers enterprise-ready services for both traditional and containerized apps – in private or hybrid cloud environments. And like PowerEdge MX, VMware Cloud Foundation accelerates organizations toward a future of constant innovation. With VMware Cloud Foundation, organizations experience the ease of the public cloud in their data center without forced migrations to unfamiliar platforms or the need to hire or build new skill sets. And by leveraging the VMware Cloud on AWS, suddenly organizations have all the tools they need to build a hybrid cloud with workload mobility across sites and regions, access to AWS services, and end-to-end operational consistency. To summarize, VMware Cloud Foundation gives organizations the best technologies available for optimized hybrid cloud value.
ii https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/poweredge-mx740c
iii https://www.dell.com/en-hk/work/shop/enterprise-products/new-poweredge-mx740c/spd/poweredge-mx740c
iv https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/t/poweredge-mx-networking-architecture-guide/
v https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/openmanage-enterprise-modular-v10001-poweredge-mx7000_users-guide4_en-us.pdf
vi https://www.principledtechnologies.com/Dell/Quick_Sync_2_OpenManage_Mobile_0717.pdf