Dell EMC and IBM to offer VMware solutions on the IBM Cloud

BARCELONA - 12 Sep 2017: IBM and Dell EMC today announced an agreement to help accelerate cloud adoption by providing Dell EMC's commercial customers access to VMware solutions on the IBM Cloud. As part of the relationship, IBM has added Dell EMC infrastructure products into the IBM Cloud, and expands VMware solutions. Customers can now move workloads to the cloud while continuing to leverage the benefits of Dell EMC infrastructure and the VMware platform.

Today's news builds on IBM's long-term partnership with VMware, which helps organizations extend existing workloads to the cloud in hours, versus weeks or months. The partnership is seeing rapid adoption with more than 1,400 clients already leveraging IBM Cloud for VMware solutions which are available across IBM’s global network of nearly 60 Cloud data centers in 19 countries . Some of those customers include Honeywell International and Telstra.

As part of the agreement, Dell EMC will begin by offering VMware vCenter Server® on the IBM Cloud to its customers, which will enable them to rapidly extend on-premises data center capacity into the public cloud, while taking advantage of their existing investments in VMware tooling and scripts, and training. This gives VMware users a familiar, predictable and valuable experience so they can move their on-premises and public cloud workloads to the IBM Cloud with ease.

“Dell EMC is laser-focused on helping customers quickly and successfully embrace their Digital Transformations. Dell EMC and IBM realize many customers will approach the challenge differently, but all are interested in realizing the benefits of cloud-like efficiencies. Our relationship with IBM allows Dell’s Commercial customers the ability to quickly and easily extend their VMware workloads to the IBM Cloud,” said Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president & general manager, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions, Dell EMC . “Customers will now be able to easily migrate enterprise applications to the single-tenant, IBM-hosted environment, and maintain the same level of control and visibility as if it were part of their own data center.”

“ Through the resale of IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, Dell EMC can offer their commercial customers a hybrid cloud choice with VMware offerings ‘as-a-Service’ as they make the cloud transition,” said Ajay Patel, senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider software business unit, VMware. “VMware Cloud Infrastructure enables customers to run, manage, connect and secure their applications across common operating environment, empowering them with a new level of IT agility and better economics.”

"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, 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 organizations can rapidly deploy and scale pre-configured solutions that optimize their existing IT investments, while using the public cloud to extract new insights and value.”

IBM Cloud for VMware solutions targets commercial customers looking for enhanced security. Customers can choose to run VMware solutions on dedicated bare metal servers, encrypt data at rest on attached storage and connect on-premises environments to IBM’s global network of cloud data centers across 19 countries.

Dell EMC offers its customers choice for their VMware environments – on-premises or in the IBM Cloud -- to help central IT more quickly meet the increasing demands from their businesses and access IBM’s cloud-native services including cognitive and analytics.

The speed of deployment and capacity expansion in the IBM Cloud helps IT deliver new services to lines of business more quickly and drive their company’s growth. Customers easily manage workloads in the cloud using the same familiar VMware-compatible tools while maintaining control with full administration access to the VMware ESXi™ hosts. In addition to the expanded relationship with Dell EMC, IBM and VMware today announced momentum for their strategic partnership , which began in 2016, aimed at accelerating enterprise cloud adoption.

Dell EMC will begin reselling VMware solutions on IBM Cloud to commercial customers beginning in Q4 2017.