Dell Has Been Active in the Cloud Market for Quite Some Time, Offering Open, Capable and Affordable Solutions Across Hardware and Services

Dell has been active in the cloud market for quite some time, offering open, capable and affordable solutions across hardware and services.

Bryan Jones Executive Director, Public Large Enterprise, Dell EMEA BRYAN JONES I 1-2-1

Helping customers to thrive in the Virtual Era

PHILIP ALSOP Editor, SNS Europe

In his new role as Executive Director, Public Large Enterprise, Dell EMEA, Bryan Jones brings with him a wealth of experience in the global storage and data centre markets, and is keen to ensure that the company’s customers are enabled, via innovative technology and data management approaches, to take best advantage of IT as the key business enabler.

Q What do you see as both the challenges and opportunities Q What are the practicalities of this announcement – both of your new EMEA role? in terms of the implementation, and the value proposition for customers? A BJ I have a really strong team in place, which gives me an obvious base to work from as I transition in to the role. My A BJ Dell sees customers continuously looking for ways to previous role was global, so I’ve spent time in EMEA and APJ innovate and drive business results in the Virtual Era, and the for the last two years. My biggest challenge coming in to this $1 billion (USD) investment that we are making this fiscal year role is really making sure we continue to build on the success will deliver solutions, services and cloud-based delivery options this team has driven, while learning the nuances of the business to help customers capture the benefits from new compute and in so many different countries with different cultural and information delivery advances. There are three key deliverables language requirements. to come out of this project which include:  Next generation cloud data centres that operate and deliver The data centre is the data centre, but doing business in this hyperscale efficiency. These new data centres will provide region has a fair amount of complexity if you work to optimise the foundation for next generation services and solutions each market. I’ll focus on that aspect through my team first. from Dell.  Global Solution Centres will help customers to work with Q Presumably, a major part of your work will be in Dell experts to architect, validate and build the efficient data coordinating the EMEA part of Dell’s recent $1 billion centre environments to meet their own business and IT goals. announcement around next generation cloud data centres?  New open, capable and affordable solutions for data management, client virtualization and data centre A BJ Having been responsible for the Large Enterprise virtualization. Business Unit’s Data Centre Marketing strategy globally, I’ve been in the loop on our strategic direction really since By bringing together technology and services alongside its inception. I’ve very excited about the opportunity to help capabilities from partners, the new data centres will allow operate that strategy here in EMEA for our customers. Building customers to take advantage of Infrastructure-, Platform- the go-to-market strategy that will inform our customers and and Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service offerings as well as IT prospects on our enhanced capabilities is my Enterprise team’s outsourcing. Through this capability, customers will benefit primary mission. from unlimited storage for production environments as well as off-premise back-up and disaster recovery with Storage-as-a- The concept of ‘The Cloud’ is very regionally influenced, Service. whether that is here in EMEA or APJ or the Americas. Getting to know what customers expect in this The flexible and scalable data centre offerings will also support space and how our enhanced capabilities can help will also be a customers’ application development and testing environments primary focus. through the ability to quickly provision systems with Platform-

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as-a-Service. In addition, a Virtual Desktop-as-a-Service Q How does the Dell cloud offering sit alongside the capabilities will allow customers to efficiently manage user data company’s existing hardware and services business – while enabling a more remote and mobile workforce. ie don’t they compete?

Q How do you see this new approach from Dell in terms of A BJ Dell Services already manages 36 customer data centres how it fits in the cloud landscape right now, and into the future? in addition to our own data centres worldwide. Our experience also includes deep expertise with data centre consolidations and A BJ From our work with customers we know that enterprise migrations. Dell itself operates one of the world’s largest data IT organisations face the challenge of being more responsive repositories for our own operations, and the experience that we to business needs while also driving greater efficiencies. We have gained through this process has been invaluable to existing see this investment in cloud-based solutions and services as customers. Moving forwards, this announcement focuses a way to solve this challenge for customers through Dell’s around our plans to expand this existing set of expertise, and we real-world experience and IP, hardware infrastructure offerings, are engaged in planning and analysis for future periods as part professional services, and as-a-service solutions (Infrastructure- of Dell’s multi-year expansion strategy. as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service). Q Presumably, over time, Dell might end up as ‘just’ a service The expansion into the ‘X-as-a-Service’ market and our desire provider – with an internal market for its own IT hardware, to put data centres close to our customers to meet their needs but no third party hardware market? will not only help customers increase their own efficiency, it also will help Dell to reach new customers that require a local A BJ I don’t see that as a practical reality any time soon for presence. Dell or any other committed tier 1 technology provider. Our vision of the IT executive of the future is one of a portfolio Q How is this cloud offering being brought to market – manager. The CIO of the future will manage business through the channel, direct, or a mixed approach? requirements against the right combination of internal infrastructure (could be architected as private cloud), public A BJ Cloud based services and solutions offered through the cloud capabilities (infrastructure and managed services), and new regional data centres will be brought to market through a hybrid that are some combination of the two. mixed approach – the direct sales channel will work with new and existing customers through consultative planning Q Would you anticipate that, with Dell having taken processes, and the solutions will be available from Dell US something of a lead in the cloud market, other storage and Certified Partners this spring. EMEA Channel availability server focused companies will have to follow your model? is targeted within 60 days after EMEA direct availability is confirmed. A BJ Dell’s strategy for new in-region data centres uses smaller facilities that are contained, modular, highly efficient Q What are the USPs of this Dell cloud offering when and highly flexible. Among the benefits, this approach offers compared to the many other approaches being taken by greater business assurance through survivability and continuity the other blue chips (both IT and telcos/service providers)? of operations.

A BJ Dell has been active in the cloud market for quite some As data centre technology has advanced, massive collocated time, offering open, capable and affordable solutions across facilities no longer necessarily offer the economic advantage hardware and services. Our cloud hardware solutions help they did in the era of manually intensive operations. With business speed deployment, lower total cost of ownership and Dell’s automation capabilities, this modular strategy will work reduce the environmental impact of clouds, and our Data Centre much more cost-effectively and efficiently as we build out new Solutions team has developed more than 19 different hardware modular capacity in line with growth in demand. platforms, which already are used by some of the largest cloud computing providers in the world. Q The cloud announcement has huge long-term implications. In the short term, what are the issues Dell is seeking to Dell is making this investment in the cloud as we want to address in EMEA at the present time? provide our customers with differentiated, efficiency driven technology and the new facilities are designed to take advantage A BJ As I mentioned earlier, the concept of the cloud is of modular, hyper-scale and high-density principles which very regionally influenced and very specific to the challenges will dramatically lower costs, reduce latency and simplify today’s IT professional is trying to solve for in their unique management. The result of this is highly scalable centres with environment. There are certainly commonalities like capacity on the “right-size” capacity. The modular structure will also let demand requirements, moving to variable OPEX models, and us quickly expand as demand increases, providing end users creating self service models that collapse the time to market for with the flexibility and scalability needed to make the cloud a new functionalities and business models – but how a customer successful IT model. approaches these concepts and what they prioritise is unique

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to them. This announcement around enhancing our capabilities performance, highly optimised file system to provide affordable here is really designed to address both points – make cloud a scale-up NAS functionality for smaller scale, high availability reality here regionally and deliver on the business concepts that deployments. customers are seeking in evaluating cloud models. Q Similarly, what does Dell have planned around the Ocarina Q Please can you provide a progress report on the integration technology acquisition? of the Compellent technology into the Dell business? A BJ Ocarina technology will be a very important component A BJ Dell | Compellent delivers one of the most optimised of our storage portfolio. Customers can expect to see new levels storage platforms in the industry, enabling customers to of efficiency in data management from the upcoming offerings access the right data, in the right place, at the right time, for that will feature content-aware compression and deduplication. the right cost. This is accomplished through several industry leading capabilities like granular, automated data tiering, thin Q It might be difficult to top a $1 billion investment provisioning, thin replication and continuous snapshots. This announcement(!), but what other developments can we platform is often defined by the term Fluid Data. This concept of expect from Dell during 2011? Fluid Data is something that also described Dell’s storage vision and shortly after the integration, Dell announced that it would A BJ You’ll see additional enhancements to our virtualization expand Fluid Data to other elements of the portfolio. You may portfolio and data centre transformation initiatives in the very have seen references to Dell’s Fluid Data architecture and this is near future. All of our efforts are really centred around helping another benefit of the Compellent acquisition. Additionally, Dell customers drive efficiency in their Enterprise – from the desktop will also embrace Compellent’s acclaimed Co-Pilot customer or end point device all the way through to the deepest parts of success programme. the data centre. We will also continue to aggressively pursue the right acquisition targets, technology and services, to drive Q The Equallogic integration seems to have been a great this efficiency and break down the barriers today’s IT executive success? faces around closed, proprietary solutions from our peers in the industry. We are committed to simplification and standards, A BJ Over 3 years ago, Dell embarked on a strategy to help in the end standards always win the day. Stay tuned, it’s an change the way our customers purchase, implement and deploy exciting time to be at Dell and to be a Dell customer. storage. The EqualLogic platform provided several capabilities in support of Dell’s strategy to deliver open, capable and Q Are you able to share a couple of recent customer success affordable solutions, including: stories that illustrate the depth and breadth of Dell’s IT  Advanced optimisation capabilities integrated across solutions? platforms for greater storage, performance and efficiencies, helping customers control data growth A BJ Formula 1™ Team Lotus is a great example of success  Automation of management tasks for increased productivity enabled through Dell’s end-to-end technology solutions. By and the ability to respond to requirements more quickly working with Dell, Team Lotus implemented server, storage and  Business-change ready features help customers address new client hardware supported by a comprehensive services package requirements as they materialise, and without disruption in just three months, allowing the business to achieve its aim of entering the 2010 F1 season after a period of absence from the The dynamic, scalable EqualLogic architecture helps customers competitive circuit. While benefitting from HPC capabilities overcome many of the barriers to efficient data management. in the factory, Team Lotus is now able to build cars 60% faster Our customers are our best sales people, 97% of customers than before, and Dell’s track-side technology allows the Team to would recommend the PS Series*. collect meta-data from each lap during the race season, allowing engineering and support staff to optimise performance on track. *Excerpted from a commissioned survey by Yankee Group on behalf of Dell, average of ratings from 2008-2010. Used with Credit Market Analysis (CMA) is another excellent example of permission of the Yankee Group. a business that is achieving strong ROI through its work with Dell. By turning to Dell Compellent and VMware to manage both Q Can we expect any announcements around the Exanet primary and secondary storage SAN’s which support data from acquired IP during the current year? around 70 million transaction enquiries each day, CMA has been able to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and performance A BJ In April, Dell announced the first product based on the required to enable the business to grow, while providing access Exanet technology. The PowerVault NX3500 integrates the Dell to essential historical data. As a result of the project, the IT Scalable File System, which is based on Exanet technology, infrastructure services team at CMA is now able to maintain to deliver the first unified storage solution Dell’s PowerVault over 100 virtual servers on just four physical boxes, leading to a iSCSI storage array product series. Leveraging existing and new massive saving in terms of administrative overheads, energy costs, MD32x0i and MD36x0i arrays, the NX3500 delivers a high data centre space and regular capital expenditure.