Dell Expands Multi-Cloud Capabilities

As more companies move to adopt multi-cloud infrastructure, Dell Technologies is working to build a smarter environment and has announced a new set of multi-cloud capabilities that span its infrastructure portfolio.

Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer at Dell Technologies, unveiled a number of new multi-cloud capabilities at the Dell Technologies World conference earlier this month, and emphasized the importance of multi-cloud to access “an ever-expanding set of innovations across clouds.”

“The world needs multi-cloud by design, not by default. And that is the great unsolved infrastructure challenge that we are working on at Dell Technologies,” Whitten said during the event’s keynote speech on May 2. “We’ve been on a journey over the last year to deliver software and services that simplify multi-cloud complexity. And today, we continue that journey.”

Dell Technologies is building off of its PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and offering a new option called CyberSense for AWS, Whitten announced.

“This solution adds adaptive analytics, machine learning, and forensic tools to detect, diagnose, and accelerate data recovery,” Whitten explained. “CyberSense goes beyond just metadata-only solutions. It’s based on full content analytics that allow you to diagnose, recover quickly, and avoid business disruption in the public cloud.”

As for other clouds, Whitten announced another new option called PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Microsoft Azure. This option “protects and isolates critical data from ransomware attacks,” Whitten said, and will be available in the Azure Marketplace next month.

“The solution provides an isolated data center environment via an isolated cyber recovery vault,” Whitten said. “The vault components are never accessible from production and access to the vault target during replication is extremely limited. Now, in the case of a cyberattack, this solution provides flexible recovery options. You can recover back to a traditional data center or a new Azure private network, or to a clean environment within Azure.”

Dell Technologies also announced additional APEX services with the introduction of Dell APEX Cyber Recovery Services. This solution will help to simplify cyberattack recovery efforts with a cloud experience, according to Whitten.

“With APEX Cyber Recovery Services, you can feel confident in the ability to recover from a cyberattack and achieve more agility by offloading the day-to-day management of data protection,” he said.

These are just the beginning of new capabilities, according to Whitten. He said Dell Technologies will offer more APEX services later this year, including “high-performance computing, machine learning operations, VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure], and more.”

The final announcement from Whitten was a new partnership with Snowflake to extend Dell Technologies’ Software-as-a-service (Saas) provider ecosystem and support a multi-cloud experience for Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

“We’re delivering two groundbreaking use cases,” Whitten said of the new partnership. “First, is the ability to move on-premise data from Dell Object Storage to Snowflake’s Data Cloud for analysis.”

“But second – for those of you that don’t want to send your data to the cloud for compliance or security reasons – we are offering an exciting alternative,” he continued. “For the first time, you can extend Snowflake’s cloud-based analytics to Object Storage on-premise without the need to move any of your data to the cloud.”

Dell Technologies’ new offerings aim to help users “unlock the capabilities of multi-cloud,” Whitten said.

“Our goal here is to offer choice. You choose how and where to store your data and turn it into insights,” Whitten said. “These are just steps in the journey. You will see much more from us in the coming months and years as we deliver a steady stream of innovation and partnerships to deliver on the promise of multi-cloud and put you at the center of the multi-cloud world.”