A rapid path to cloud infrastructure

According to Michael Dell, “A cloud is not a destination or singular path, but a transformation that places IT squarely at the center of the enterprise enabling the creation of new IT value.” I believe that an organization’s ability to react to a landscape of changing IT requirements is essential to succeed in the future.

Dell’s customers span the globe and range in every size. As customers evaluate the benefits they expect to achieve from the deployment of a cloud infrastructure, it could be viewed as an evolutionary improvement if they already have a high percentage of virtualization in their data center. But, for those just starting out on this path, it will certainly have a revolutionary impact to their organizations, improving processes and driving efficiencies across the IT organization. The impact of implementing a cloud infrastructure is relative to where an organization is in their adoption of virtualization.

Cloud computing is about to embark on a path of rapid growth over the next 5-10 years. Cloud computing is going to become an operational standard for most medium-sized organizations, and many smaller sized IT departments due to the wide benefits it provides. We are seeing a significant industry shift and an increase in customers asking Dell about our cloud offerings. This whole transformation is somewhat like what we saw with the client/server transition a couple decades ago. We are in a world of “now,” with customers demanding access to data in new ways and on different types of end-point devices. Clouds can deliver improvements in IT efficiencies to quickly respond to new demand, powerful management tools and innovative ways to improvement operational costs. These new infrastructures will be able to improve the utilization of data center hardware to create elastic, scalable environments to keep up with these new demands. This approach will solve many of the pressures we see growing in the industry!

The vStart family has been growing in popularity as a cost-efficient platform, rapidly deploying virtual machines in mid-sized data centers and branch offices. These solutions have a tightly-engineered appliance approach to solving many challenges in designing and deploying virtual or cloud infrastructure. vStart solutions leverage Dell and our virtualization partner’s best practices using our latest technologies, including professional deployment services, ProSupport next business day support, and plug-ins for VMware vCenter. This approach makes it easy to manage your virtual and physical environments from a common management tool.

About the Author: James Meeker