Dell Technologies rolled out a bunch of updates to its year-old Dell Technologies Cloud today including a storage partnership with Google Cloud, support for VMware’s Kubernetes products, and new hardware and software features for its VMware-based SD-WAN appliances.

The vendor first announced Dell Technologies Cloud, its cloud infrastructure portfolio, last year at its annual users conference with two products that essentially bundled Dell EMC hardware and VMware software into an integrated appliance for hybrid cloud environments. Dell Technologies owns about 81% of VMware, and as the companies continue to more tightly integrate their offerings the parent company is banking on customers choosing Dell EMC hardware for their VMware-based hybrid cloud environments.

Customers want public cloud benefits — flexibility, scalability, and access to the latest developer tools and frameworks — across their entire IT infrastructure, said Varun Chhabra, VP of product marketing for Dell Technologies Cloud. “These are all the benefits that customers have enjoyed in the public cloud, and they are now looking at us and saying, ‘hey why can’t we get this everywhere?’ Cloud is no longer just the domain of public cloud.” It’s an operating model, he said. The new announcement “are related to bringing that flexibility to our customers regardless of where they want to run their workloads — whether it’s on premises, at the edge, or in their data center.”

The first announcement involves a storage partnership between Dell Technologies and Google Cloud. And it’s worth noting that Google Cloud has also been boosting its hybrid-cloud partnership with VMware over the past year.

Today the two companies launched a service called Dell Technologies Cloud OneFS for Google Cloud. It combines Dell EMC Isilon scale-out, network-attached file storage with Google Cloud’s analytics and compute services. And it allows companies to access applications and move workloads as large as 50 petabytes in a single filesystem between on-premises Dell storage systems and Google Cloud.

Typically, organizations use public-cloud storage for block and object data, and then store their file data in on-premises data centers. In fact, file data often accounts for at least 50% of companies’ on-premises data, Chhabra said, citing an Enterprise Strategy Group statistic. “[File data] is growing very rapidly on premises, but it hasn’t grown as much as in the public cloud, and one of the reasons is that the file storage offers in the public cloud don’t scale as much and don’t have the performance that customers are used to on premises.”

So this storage partnership aims to give customers the best of both worlds, and lets them access workloads across on-premises data centers and Google Cloud using consistent operations. “Now customers can take the massive compute capabilities in public cloud, and pair them up with a similarly scalable file storage platform,” Chhabra said.

Dell’s other announcements focus on its tightening its ties with VMware. The first piece highlights VMware’s push into cloud native and Kubernetes, integrating VMware Cloud Foundation software with Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. The latest version of the software stack embeds Kubernetes natively into vSphere, which provides the compute virtualization technology for VMware Cloud Foundation. It uses Kubernetes as its control plane, and this allows developers and IT teams to use a single platform to manage both legacy workloads built on virtual machines and newer, containerized apps.

Dell also added new, smaller node configurations for its as-a-service portfolio, called Dell Technologies on Demand. And as part of this portfolio, Dell and VMware also jointly announced the second generation of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. This is an on-premises cloud for data centers and edge locations delivered as a cloud service — Dell calls this a “data center-as-a-service offering.”

While the original version that launched last year supported both edge and data center use cases, “what we really heard over and over was how customers wanted something that was more optimized purely for the data center,” said Kit Colbert, VP and CTO of the Cloud Platform business unit at VMware. The updated product targets larger enterprises’ data centers with 42 rack unit infrastructure that doubles the amount of supported processor cores, memory options, and NVMe all-flash storage.

Additionally, the cloud service is now also certified with VMware Horizon, its virtual desktop infrastructure, to support business continuity efforts, which is becoming increasingly important to newly remote workforces as well as healthcare workers in hospitals and clinics. And the service has also added support for Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery product to protect customers’ critical data and VMs from cyberattacks.

Finally, Dell updated its SD-WAN Solution powered by VMware. The update gives customers more appliance and bandwidth capability options for rapid deployment of SD-WAN in a single solution — another feature that customers have been requesting during the pandemic, Chhabra. This helps improve performance for demanding workloads like voice over IP, video streaming, and virtual desktop infrastructure.