Dell EMC, IBM to offer VMware solutions on the IBM Cloud
In a bid to accelerate cloud adoption across the enterprise, IBM and Dell EMC have partnered to provide Dell EMC's commercial customers access to VMware solutions on the IBM Cloud, with big blue deploying Dell EMC infrastructure to enable the offering.
As part of the announcement, made at VMworld Europe 2017 in Barcelona, Dell EMC will offer the VMware vCenter Server on the IBM Cloud to its customers, which will enable them to extend on-premises datacentre capacities into the public cloud, as the company's CEO Michael Dell pushes his nirvana of a multi-cloud world.
Tuesday's announcement also builds on IBM's existing partnership with VMware, which was formed to help organisations extend existing workloads to the cloud at speed.
"Companies in every industry need fast and easy ways to deploy and move workloads to the cloud while not compromising security," said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, general manager of IBM Cloud.
"This agreement makes it easier than ever for Dell's thriving channel of commercial customers to access VMware's capabilities on IBM Cloud. Now these organisations can rapidly deploy and scale pre-configured solutions that optimise their existing IT investments, while using the public cloud to extract new insights and value."
IBM Cloud for VMware solutions was touted by the companies as targeting commercial customers looking for enhanced security, with customers able to choose to run VMware solutions on dedicated bare metal servers, encrypt data at rest on attached storage, and connect on-premises environments to the IBM Cloud.
Dell EMC will begin reselling VMware solutions on IBM Cloud to commercial customers from the fourth quarter of 2017.
IBM also used its time at VMworld Europe 2017 to announce SAP-Certified Solutions for VMware on IBM Cloud, and also new SAP-Certified Bare Metal Servers.
The new Certified Public Cloud Infrastructure for SAP Applications offer up to 8TB of memory and VMware configurations to support data-intensive business applications.
The availability of new SAP-certified bare metal servers in the IBM Cloud includes one of the largest cloud solutions for memory-intensive SAP workloads, and new configurations for VMware environments, big blue explained.
According to IBM, the new cloud solutions are designed to give enterprises more power and performance required for the increasing volume of data, noting that every day, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created.
"To win in this arena, enterprises need a cloud platform that can help them maximise their core business applications and gain new insights from increasing volumes of data," said John Considine, general manager for cloud infrastructure services, IBM. "IBM is building more powerful and cost-effective solutions for SAP HANA applications in the cloud so that enterprises can focus on business innovation instead of underlying infrastructure."
IBM's newest cloud infrastructure for SAP HANA solutions on the IBM Cloud is designed to provide clients with larger and more powerful infrastructure to run memory-intensive SAP HANA applications, IBM said in a statement.
The announcement builds on the relationship the two companies already have, with IBM currently providing cloud solutions to support SAP HANA applications, including fully managed services and infrastructure-as-a-service certified by SAP.
Also announced on Tuesday was the adoption of VMware HCX Technologies by IBM to enable large-scale application migration and ongoing portability between both cloud environments.
Come Q4 2017, the VMware Horizon Cloud service will also be offered by IBM Cloud and will be delivered as a fully cloud-hosted service managed end to end by IBM, or as a hybrid solution using on-premises hyperconverged infrastructure to enable new use cases for desktops-as-a-service (DaaS), the companies explained.
The new offering comes as IBM Cloud receives VMware Cloud Verified status.
The news followed the announcement from VMware that it's sending over 1,400 of its client VMware environments to the IBM Cloud, with Honeywell International and Vodafone among those heralding the transition.
Additionally, Vodafone and IBM announced a new service enabling enterprises to move their VMware-based workloads from the Vodafone Hosted Private Cloud to the IBM Cloud.