Dell is throwing more chum in the water expecting customers will snap up its cloud.
Back late last year it put VMware’s vCloud Datacenter Services on its cloud and offered American users a 60-day introductory trial to try out a hybrid or simply Dell’s public cloud for $999. Apparently it worked and now Dell is extending those trials through July 31 and adding Canada. A similar offer will be made to UK users – and any EMEA accounts not restricted by data residency rules – starting August 31.
When the trial is over, customers can continue to use the vCloud widgetry in dedicated or multi-tenant environments and pay for compute by the hour or by the month.
Kevin Hanes, the executive director of infrastructure and cloud computing services at Dell, says the exercise is teaching Dell how to sell the cloud. It all depends on getting people to articulate what it is they think they want.
Dell concedes that public clouds – while tempting because of their capacity, agility and lower costs – can be flat-out scary because of security issues.
Hanes makes the point that some private data centers are even scarier than public clouds because of lax security and Dell claims the Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services addresses security concerns by offering some of the industry’s most robust security services, including active monitoring from SecureWorks, data encryption services from Trend Micro, and multiple layers of virtual and physical security in Dell data centers. All are included in the trial offer.
The company is playing to research that finds adoption of hybrid and private clouds out ahead of public cloud adoption although Amazon doesn’t seem to be doing too badly.
It also says that 45% of vCloud customers are generally SMBs, 29% are large enterprises and Fortune 500s, and 26% in the public sector
Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is of course enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosted in a secure Dell data center.
Dell can provide the software, hardware and services needed to become an extension of a company’s data center environment and let VMware customers transition existing VMware virtualized workloads to the cloud and manage them using their existing VMware cloud infrastructure.
Dell claims to have a lot of customers already using VMware for virtualization.
The widgetry is built using a common management platform based on open industry cloud standards. With the same VMware cloud infrastructure for connectivity across both the private and public cloud creates a “virtual datacenter” where applications are portable across the clouds.
Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is backed by Dell’s ProSupport, which provides 24x7x365 phone support to help customers minimize downtime or interruption.
Dell says its believes that cloud isn’t a technology, it’s a corporate strategy – and that true business agility comes from an integrated hybrid approach that links applications, data and infrastructure seamlessly wherever they are.
It wants people to build and operate an on-premise private cloud infrastructure, and access secure multi-tenant or community clouds.
Gartner predicts that 50% of the Global 1000 will store customer-sensitive data in the public cloud by 2016.