Dell EMC Takes Another Hyperconverged, Hybrid Cloud Step with Microsoft Azure

Written by Lynn Haber
May 22, 2019

Dell EMC's enhancements to its Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI offers should please partners.

Dell EMC on Wednesday announced enhancements to Microsoft’s Azure Stack HCI and Azure Stack portfolios.

Microsoft Azure Stack HCI is a hyperconverged Windows Server 2019 cluster that uses validated hardware to run virtualized workloads on premises, optionally connecting to Azure services for cloud-based backup, site recovery and more. It’s available from a range of Microsoft hardware partners. Azure Stack is an extension of Azure that provides a way to run applications on premises.

Wednesday’s announcement includes: the addition of Windows Server 2019 to all 15 configurations under WSSD; the availability of Azure Stack on the Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 platform; and a metered usage consumption model for Azure Stack infrastructure with Flex on Demand from Dell Financial Services.

Dell EMC’s Ray Balli

The news came out of Microsoft’s Virtual Windows Server Summit.

“Dell EMC has a long history of co-engineering with Microsoft and these new enhancements further strengthen our joint portfolio across hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud solutions,” Ray Balli, product marketing consultant, HCI, Dell EMC wrote in a blog. “By working together to deliver innovative services faster and more frequently, we can become a real partner of change for our customers in this digital transformation era.”

This new offering leverages the Windows Server Datacenter license to provide software defined storage, using Hyper-V virtualization down to the storage level. These multinode clusters provide cost-effective volumes with high performance and low latency, using common management tools. In addition to the vendor’s previous 15 use case-driven configurations under WSSD, Dell EMC has added:

Windows Server 2019 to all 15 configurations.
The newly released storage dense PowerEdge R740xd2 as a new chassis platform, allowing for more demanding workloads.
QuickStart — a four-node, two-switch configuration, an end-to-end high availability solution.
Dell EMC PowerSwitch 25GbE networking for increased throughput.
A new upgrade service, taking customers from existing Storage Spaces Direct Ready Node architectures to Windows Server 2019 with continued support entitlement.
Systems management by unifying and automating management capabilities for modern infrastructures with the OpenManage Integration for Windows Admin Center console.