Dell EMC has broadened its support for Microsoft data center environments with substantial updates across the Dell EMC XC Series, Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack and Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server. Addressing key IT opportunities and use cases from hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) to hybrid cloud and data analysis, these updated solutions demonstrate Dell EMC's support for customers operating in Microsoft environments, said company.
“Dell EMC values the strong collaboration we have had with Microsoft for more than 30 years, which has resulted in world-class, innovative solutions delivered to customers worldwide,” said Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions, Dell EMC. “The innovations we're announcing today are evidence of how our work with Microsoft has truly changed how our customers conduct their day-to-day activities, enabling them to gain greater value from their IT infrastructures and, more importantly, develop and deliver services to help achieve their ultimate business goals.”
The Dell EMC XC Series offers HCI appliances for customers running a variety of virtualized workloads with their choice of hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V. As XC Series HCI environments are becoming increasingly popular for Microsoft workloads, including SQL, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint, new advancements to the XC Series include:
Dell EMC XC Series Data Protection Management Console, which is launched from within the XC Series management interface and integrates and simplifies data protection operation and automation across XC Series deployments. This offers complete data protection capabilities with Dell EMC Avamar VE running on XC Series clusters and backup to Dell EMC Data Domain and cloud tiering to Virtustream and Microsoft Azure. IT admins gain the ability to quickly and easily monitor and manage backups for multiple XC Series clusters while utilizing best of breed Dell EMC technologies in one turnkey solution.
Optimization for Microsoft Windows 2016 Hyper-V plus Azure, available at no additional cost to customers, including support for Windows Hyper-V 2016 with insights into XC Series clusters. The XC Series Azure Log Analytics Solution provides integration of XC Series into customer's OMS-based data center automation tools, enabling insights such as trend analysis and behavioral anomaly detection.
Dell EMC also announces it has been approved by Microsoft to deliver Azure through the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Direct and Indirect Microsoft partner model worldwide. Based on Dell EMC's proven Azure and hybrid cloud platform global expertise, this enables the company to have the advantage of offering comprehensive, end-to-end Azure Stack hybrid cloud solutions, including Azure services and solutions, to both customers and channel partners globally.
Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, introduced in May 2017, is a new, turnkey, hybrid cloud platform, delivering infrastructure and platform as a service and shipping now to early customers. It offers a fast and simple path for implementing and sustaining a trusted hybrid cloud platform based on Microsoft Azure Stack, delivering a consistent experience across the Azure on-premises cloud and on-premises through Azure Stack.
Providing customers with more powerful compute performance capabilities, Dell EMC has added support for Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers to the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server and the Dell EMC Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes. Additionally, the Dell Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server also adds Dell EMC Unity storage, offering customers high performance and affordable flash optimized architecture that supports scores of VMs while delivering abundant input/output operations per second (IOPS) at low latency for running demanding Microsoft SQL Server workloads.
Dell EMC XC Series updates have planned global availability and Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL and Dell EMC Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes updates have planned global availability in Q4 2017.
