AUSTIN, TEX. – Now that the combined Dell EMC are six weeks into their marriage, the company charted a multi-cloud path for the channel community.
Approximately 8,000 channel partners in attendance at the Dell EMC World event were told by David Goulden, the president of Dell EMC, that a transformation is occurring in traditional IT moving to cloud-native IT. Dell EMC is positioning itself for a market place interested in a network of private and public clouds to form a multi-cloud world. The new company is pushing a hybrid cloud model and trying to provide customers with products that provide workload balance and flexibility.
At the heart of this strategy is the expansion of its converged infrastructure line with the integration of PowerEdge services into VxRail and VxRack systems. 
“This is a journey where you can take in steps. A three-step process that has a complete pre-engineered private clouds for cloud native apps that works with public clouds in Virtustream and the Virtustream storage cloud. You can get to the hybrid cloud very quickly,” Goulden said.
Scott Harper, a vice president of data center and hybrid cloud at CDN Top 100 Solution Provider Softchoice of Toronto subscribes to the hybrid cloud model except for those who are born in the cloud. Softchoice has become one of Dell’s biggest channel partners in the last few years. Softchoice is the only partner to offer Dell Pro Support Services in a managed services called Keystone. The company also is one of two solution providers to be hybrid cloud authorized by Dell.
Softchoice, who has captured back-to-back National Partner of the Year awards from Dell at the same time as Dell won Softchoice’s North American partner of the year award two year’s running, believes the product road map from Dell EMC aligns with Softchoice’s own strategy to help customers modernize the data centre first, then automate before going to the hybrid cloud.
Harper added, customers in Canada are doing assessments on cloud and even those who desire to move 100 per cent to the cloud have under-estimated the dependence of their apps and data sets. “So moving everything to the public cloud may not make sense in a number of cases,” he said.
Dell EMC has also partnered with high profile public cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM SoftLayer.
Priced at $50,000, these new VxRail hyper converged systems have 200 VM running VMware. According to Goulden, most of these systems can run an entire business.
Michael Dell, in a special question and answer session with the press, said the $50,000 for VxRail makes the product a data centre in a box and it was built to be partner ready with a per month price point of just $1,400.
The price point of the new VxRail was shocking to Harper. At $50,000 or $1,400 a month, he believes it is well suited for SMB. “I love that announcement on VxRail and VxRack. I see this as an opportunity that will grow like mad at these price points for hyper converged,” he added.
How does it compare with Cisco’s offering in hyper converged?
Harper said that Cisco’s product is a scale up type of solution with hyper converge along with VBlock, but he sees a greater appetite for hyper converged for SMB and in mid-market.
“The benefits of hyper converge and converged with reference architecture instead of building your own with these prices from Dell EMC it will drive wide scale adoption in the SMB,” Harper said.
