Dell Technologies launched an infrastructure-focused platform targeted at the growing private cloud market and bolstered its NativeEdge offerings to help support more complicated edge applications.
The new Dell Private Cloud product is targeted at supporting private clouds that run cloud software from vendors like Broadcom, Nutanix, and Red Hat on Dell’s disaggregated infrastructure. This is an increasingly competitive landscape driven by Broadcom’s licensing changes to its VMware Cloud Platform (VCP) product that has dominated the space, with those changes providing a potential conquer opportunity for rivals like Nutanix and Red Hat.
Varun Chhabra, SVP of infrastructure and telecom marketing at Dell, explained during a press briefing that customers can access “validated blueprints” from those software platform providers to ease deployments.
“This is designed to deploy private cloud simply on a disaggregate infrastructure, maintaining the flexibility that customers are telling us they want with their cloud operating systems,” Chhabra said, adding “this is designed to really protect investments and adapt as needs evolve.”
Dell enhances this investment protection by allowing the infrastructure to be “fully transferable, expandable, and reusable,” Chhabra explained. “What that means is that customers have the flexibility and the freedom to bring their own cloud operating system or hypervisor operating system licenses and be able to use the same Dell private cloud infrastructure and the automation that we provide for multiple cloud operating systems that customers want.”
Initial support is limited to VMware’s vSphere software, which sits below VCF and is targeted at mid-tier, small data centers looking to virtualize compute infrastructure. Dell has broader support scheduled for later this year.
Chhabra later explained that the Dell Private Cloud offering builds on the vendor’s Automation Platform by packaging “together a specific outcome for private cloud scenarios, bringing not just automated deployment … but AIOps capabilities and other capabilities over time that are designed specifically for customers’ private cloud environments.”
NativeEdge gets smarter, more secure
Dell also updated its NativeEdge platform with high-availability clustering, policy-based load balancing, an updated UI to make it easier for virtual machine (VM) imports from other virtualization vendors, VM snapshots and backup API integration, and support for third-party hardware.
Chhabra explained that this last item includes “zero-touch onboarding, a unified control plane, the ability to be able to deploy applications to thousands and tens-of-thousands of devices out at the edge from a central control point.”
The NativeEdge platform also received security updates include proactive security drift control and compliance with FIPS-142 standards.
Combined, NativeEdge can save users up to 68 percent of their time using automation for deployments at the edge, 79 percent in cost savings, and the ability to deploy applications at the edge in less than one minute.
Dell unveiled the NativeEdge platform at its tech event in 2023. The platform, which replaced its “Project Frontier,” provides an edge computing platform supporting choice around software, IoT, multicloud tools, and operational technology to simplify, automate, and manage edge infrastructure.
