You’ve heard the sayings before “every company is a software company,” or “software is eating the world.” Common industry buzz terms, but it’s just speaking to the next evolution in application architectures, as organizations embrace cloud-native and containerized workloads.
As we increasingly continue to both consume and develop applications and code, the question is how to build and deliver a superior digital experience, underpinned by those applications and your data? And how do we best support that journey?
Last year, we launched Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) to solve these challenges. It’s a turnkey experience for hybrid cloud that combines VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell EMC VxRail in a single solution with full stack integration. Tight VMware integration delivers automated lifecycle management, making upgrades easy and fast—only three clicks, 90 minutes for pre-check and fully integrated HW and SW stack upgrades.¹ The vision of DTCP was a simple and powerful solution to help modernize IT and rapidly scale VMware environments in support of a hybrid cloud operating model.
To further deliver on that vision and as part of the broader Dell Technologies Cloud announcements today, I am excited to share with you several updates to DTCP. Today’s updates are aimed at enabling support for modern applications and a wider range of workloads, as well our smallest starting configuration allowing you to get going with a hybrid cloud deployment at an even lower cost.
Evolving the IT admin role with support for Kubernetes at cloud scale
Most CIOs agree improving their application portfolio is a top priority, and that containers and cloud-native will have the biggest impact. However, the challenge is how to modernize the portfolio to include both cloud-native together with traditional applications?
With DTCP now supporting VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and Tanzu, you now have a single platform for this journey. This latest release includes VMware Tanzu™ Kubernetes Grid—delivering Kubernetes integration with vSphere 7 and unifying containers with virtual machines as a first-class citizen. This update means DCTP now supports both modern, cloud native applications as well as traditional, virtual machine-based instances.
In other words, DTCP is now an even better platform to build new digital experiences on.
With the ability to use Kubernetes in the familiar environment of the vSphere Client, IT admins can now simultaneously keep all the mission-critical applications up and running, while driving innovation around modern applications. By addressing the cloud-native skills gap, this dramatically reduces the complexity of using Kubernetes and Kubernetes-based tooling for developers.
Together with our 30 day synchronous release schedule in coordination with VMware, you can rest easy knowing your infrastructure is in a continuously validated state and secure.
Getting started with hybrid cloud is now easier than ever
We are also introducing a smaller consolidated architecture enabling DTCP to be deployed with a 4-node configuration (down from an 8-node starting point). This lowers the entry cost for hybrid cloud solutions even further. For this architecture, the management and user workload domains run together on a shared management domain. This is perfect for smaller environments for customers that want to get started with VMware SDDC, delivering a simple way to start small and grow their cloud deployment over time.
New node types covering a wider range of workloads
Earlier this year we introduced subscription pricing for select configurations of DTCP. With the addition of a simple monthly pricing model that includes hardware, software and services—you now have more choice and flexibility in the way you consume cloud infrastructure. Today we are adding three new node configurations (for a total of six options) to cover an even wider range of workloads. The new node configurations include a low-cost general-purpose node, a storage-optimized node and an extra-large memory/storage node featuring 1.5 TB RAM and 61 TB All-Flash storage capacity for memory intensive applications.
Accelerate IT transformation
Taking advantage of the latest innovations, customers can now deliver a modern application experience in every cloud. Just like change was driven around consolidation and automation with the introduction of virtualization, we can now drive a new round of innovation for modern applications built on a single hybrid cloud platform for both virtualized monolithic and containerized microservices applications.
For more information on modern applications and the benefits customers have realized from transitioning to a modern approach, download our eBook.
¹ Disclaimer: Based on internal analysis using standard configuration, March 2020; times may vary based on configuration.
