ACCELERATING YOUR CLOUD JOURNEYInfrastructure flexibility key to cloud-enabled better business outcomes

2. IT concerns and opportunities Migrating to the cloud is complex 3. Multi-cloud solution decisions Dell EMC Intel-based infrastructure 4. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers 5. Find the right platform for the compute job 6. Scaling to the cloud with Dell EMC End-to-end solutions 8. Focus on Better Business Outcomes

INSIDE

After carefully researching the cloud, you still may be hesitant to take the leap—but at some point the CEO gave you a mandate: “The cloud is here, and our competitors are leveraging it. Find out how we can deliver better business results.”

Or maybe your organization has migrated a small amount of data and apps to the public cloud, liked the results, and now your executives are ready to ramp up. Or perhaps your organization already has gone all-in on the public cloud, but is struggling with scalability, integration, and cost issues.

Wherever you are on your cloud journey—whether you’ve just received marching orders from the CEO to “check out this cloud thing” or are well into managing ambitious cloud deployments that deliver software, infrastructure and compute platforms as services—it’s essential to have an experienced partner and guide to ensure your business is getting the most benefit from cloud technology.

A successful cloud strategy can help organizations easily adapt to change, along with providing numerous competitive advantages. A flawed cloud deployment, on the other hand, can limit an organization’s ability to compete in the digital economy, leading to higher IT and operating costs, lower revenue, diminished market share, and possible data loss. So there’s a lot at stake.

As of 2016, 62% of organizations had deployed a private cloud infrastructure, while hybrid cloud deployments have grown to 26% in 2016.1 As the adoption of hybrid cloud models accelerates, organizations are partnering with multiple cloud service providers. Consequently, hybrid cloud is not just a monolithic platform private-public architecture, but more of a multi-cloud reality.

WHITE PAPER1. IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study, 2016

Existing enterprise applications are being re- platformed to run in automated infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments while new applications are being developed in native cloud environments that leverage a platform as a service (PaaS) model. What IT pros need as they ponder how to execute a multi-cloud strategy (including on-premises infrastructure) is the experience and knowledge a global infrastructure, cloud and services provider can bring.

Dell EMC offers a combination of Intel®-powered hardware, software, services, and expertise to help IT leaders map out and implement the ideal multi-cloud solution for their organizations. This white paper will explain how Dell EMC provides organizations with new technology, experienced support, and cloud offerings to drive improved business outcomes.

IT concerns and opportunitiesEvery winning design, every transaction, and every stroke of the keyboard in an organization is dependent on the underlying compute platform. For that reason, many IT professionals still are hesitant to move all storage and computing processes to the public cloud. They worry about potential security vulnerabilities, loss of data, disruption to the business if the public cloud connection goes down, and being locked in with one cloud provider if costs or service levels become an issue. In other words, they worry about change and loss of control.

“IT administrators hate to change anything,” says Gene Chesser, a storage strategist with Dell. “A database administrator wants all of his storage in his server. He doesn’t want to use a SAN or a NAS, much less the public cloud. He wants to control his environment. Change is scary, and change also can be expensive.”

However, staff and skillset shortages as well as daunting time-to-market requirements are making IT professionals realize the benefits of a public cloud solution for certain workloads. At the same time, they realize other workloads may be more viable for an on-premises or private cloud solution due to sensitivity of data, performance require-ments and stringent SLAs.

The ultimate goal is a modern data center that improves the delivery of traditional and cloud- native applications, thus reducing the cost structure while allowing IT to focus resources on business innovation. Dell EMC engineered

systems and validated solutions are built on pillars of the modern data center with flash, scale-out, cloud-enabled and software-defined technologies to maximize performance and time to value.

The ideal multi-cloud solution includes a network- accessible, self-service portal that considers all your organization’s governance and security policies to allow the different lines of business or application owners to safely and securely request the required resources. This could be a combi-nation of on or off premises, public, private, IaaS, PaaS, software as a service (SaaS), and infra-structure platform as a service (iPaaS), depending on your workloads. Wherever you are in your journey, Dell EMC provides the knowledge and experience to help you optimize efficiency, ROI and performance to help you meet your data center goals. Intel® Xeon® powered Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers, combined with services and support, are the key to making your multi-cloud strategy cost-effective, secure and flexible.

Migrating to the cloud is complexThe data center no longer is considered a secret, magical vault only understood by IT professionals. As IT increasingly influences the business, business leaders are much more involved with IT decisions. IT professionals may fear being left behind if they don’t become more flexible and innovative, forcing businesses to look more closely at utilizing cloud resources. At the same time IT pros are faced with the challenge of adding more applications to an already complex and aging infrastructure.

Many IT professionals believe the burdens of infra-structure management are robbing them of time that could be spent identifying how technology can better drive their business. Cloud computing not only drives automation and IT transformation, it changes the cost structure of IT to reduce costs and help fund new digital business initiatives that create new revenue streams and reach new markets. Delivering on this promise requires an IT strategy which is rapidly shifting from building out the infrastructure and buying off-the-shelf applica-tions to buying solutions engineered on converged infrastructure and focusing investments on building innovative applications that differentiate.

The question for any organization is not when to begin adopting a multi-cloud solution, but rather how to create the right strategy to deploy the cloud capabilities needed to achieve their business goals. Dell EMC has a complete end-to-end

CLOUD GROWTH CONTINUED IN 2016

Organizations deploying

SOURCE: IDG Enterprise Cloud Computing Study, 2016

Organizations deploying

PRIVATE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

HYBRID CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

62

26

%

%

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strategy that includes the infrastructure, software, and services, including both pre-engineered, “buy” cloud solutions, “build-out” cloud options and financing that accelerates your business.

Now is the time to begin transforming your digital strategy. If you haven’t already begun, the first step is to assess your specific workload require-ments, goals and budgets to determine which workloads and resources are better suited to a private cloud deployment versus the public cloud.

Multi-cloud solution decisions Performance, cost, accessibility, and security requirements all must be considered by IT staff and other decision makers when deciding where applications and workloads should reside.

Auditors and regulations may prevent some applications and data from moving to the cloud. Large or highly integrated data sets may be more easily managed on-premises or on private hosted infrastructure if they have specific performance requirements. Further, organizations that have already made significant investments in their infrastructure may choose to keep their critical applications on-premises or privately hosted to increase their return on investment. In fact, many IT organizations are moving early-stage workloads on public cloud back to on premises or private hosted infrastructure as a means of attaining lower, more predictable costs and/or lowering risk as the use and importance of those early-stage workloads grow.

Public cloud solutions are often an option when there is a shortage of IT staff, necessary skillsets or the actual infrastructure required to maintain a data set. In some cases new workloads that

require a faster time to market, a low level of customization and ability to scale rapidly are placed on the public cloud.

As we move toward a cloud-first future, today’s infrastructure must be built on an open, standards- based platform that supports a range of applications and allows you to scale seamlessly and adapt to a multi-cloud solution as your requirements change.

Dell EMC Intel-Based InfrastructureCIOs are at the core of the transformation agenda, balancing between operational efficiency and forward-thinking projects. In both cases, however, a solid reliable foundation of servers is the bedrock. Dell EMC is an industry-leading provider of virtualized, software-defined and engineered systems on a standards-based, common server platform. Data centers are increasingly server-centric and on modern compute platforms the server is the enabler for the new multi-cloud reality. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers enable you to easily scale by using your existing investments, simplifying how to leverage cloud resources, and taking advantage of proven leadership in hybrid cloud and hyper-converged architectures.

The cloud journey first begins with a standardized, building block approach to your infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking. Not only will this allow for the ease of scaling out when virtualized, but it will greatly simplify automation and orchestration as well. This enables resource abstraction from the underlying hardware, and pooling of resources for efficient utilization. The good news is that a multi-cloud strategy can leverage the assets you already own and enable the configuration of a range of service-level pools. You can choose to begin with

WE WANTED TO WORK WITH a solution

provider that understood

the cloud. We wanted

an IT partner that sup-

ported the principles of

open-standards platforms

that could adapt to the

specific needs of each of

our clients. We chose Dell

because we trusted the

brand and knew it was a

major player in cloud IT,

helping service providers

deliver innovative services.”

José Ignacio López GarcíaHead of Cloud Services, Itconic

“

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a secure, private cloud infrastructure based on Intel-powered Dell EMC servers, storage, and networking and then easily connect to public cloud resources to create a hybrid cloud solution on your own terms. You also can choose a pre-engineered cloud solution with Dell EMC server technology to ramp up quickly.

Dell EMC server solutions do more than compute: They enable secure data and a simplified path to the cloud. With Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and processing power from Intel, you get access to IT solutions end to end. From the onboard integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) with Lifecycle Controller in each server to a huge array of complementary technologies, software, and services, Dell EMC can help you develop data center solutions that optimize your multi-cloud strategy by controlling operating costs and resource utilization.

Dell EMC servers are designed for seamless inte-gration into major private-cloud ecosystems such as Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat OpenStack with support for IaaS and PaaS. In fact, Intel-based Dell EMC proven servers are the backbone for many of the top cloud service providers.

With the Dell EMC extensive storage and server portfolio based on the latest Intel technology, you can improve security and performance while storing more data on less hardware. You also can optimize and modernize your network infrastructure with high-performance, reliable solutions that power some of the world’s most demanding enterprise and cloud environments.

Dell EMC PowerEdge ServersWhatever components you choose for your multi-cloud reality—from on or off premises, public and private to IaaS, PaaS and SaaS—your data center begins with your compute platform. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers are the foundation for multi-cloud solutions from private cloud data centers and public cloud services to pre- engineered, turnkey cloud solutions.

The Dell EMC broad server portfolio of rack, tower and shared infrastructure platforms offers high performance powered by Intel® processors, versatile configurations, zero-touch deployment and intelligent management embedded in every server. Dell EMC PowerEdge offers open standards-based, x86 platforms to help you meet evolving business objectives and quickly scale from on-premises to the public cloud.

Dell EMC modern server generations enable you to optimize your virtualization and cloud environ- ments for improved VM density, streamlined management and enhanced performance. For multi-cloud environments, virtualization platforms must deliver performance with high core counts, substantial memory density, and flexible I/O to be able to assign appropriate levels of system resources to VMs. In-server hybrid storage and increased networking bandwidth provide a scal-able, software-defined virtual storage platform.

Dell EMC servers are powered by Intel® Xeon® processors that boost performance, efficiency

DELL EMC POWEREDGE SERVERS

POWERED BY INTEL® XEON® PROCESSORS

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and versatility for your data center. Designed to deliver the best combination of performance, built-in capabilities and cost-effectiveness, the Intel Xeon Processor product families can help you streamline operations, eliminate data bottlenecks and increase your business agility from virtual-ization and multi-cloud computing to real-time financial transactions.

The ramifications of fast-data access and the need for rapid reconfiguration with evolving IT demands requires smarter methodologies and a simpler way to execute repetitive tasks. Dell EMC enterprise management software stream-lines the complex processes around deployment, management and updating with built-in support options, empowering you to control the IT lifecycle with minimal manual intervention.

The embedded intelligence of iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller and the robust, timesaving management features of the Dell OpenManage Essentials simplify the administration of PowerEdge servers. Remote management and continuous availability capabilities are enhanced through integration with ProSupport, SupportAssist and OpenManage Mobile.

Dell EMC servers, when covered by ProSupport Plus and integrated with SupportAssist, can provide predictive failure prevention action that can alert an organization to a potential failure before it occurs. With self-repairing BIOS, fault- resilient memory, internal dual SD module, redundant power supplies, fans and hard drives,

you can ensure high availability for the most stringent SLAs. In addition, self-encrypting drives (SED) and other security options help you meet legal mandates to protect your critical data.

Find the right platform for the compute jobWhile cloud is the future, infrastructure still remains essential to operate your business. Modern servers are key to supporting your multi-cloud environments and giving you the flexibility to seamlessly transfer data and workloads to the public cloud and back as needed, while keeping costs under control.

“It’s much more cost-effective to stay up to date with the latest server technology,” says Dell’s Chesser. “The density, the footprint, the memory, the cores—all of the pieces of technology that exist out there make your computing enterprise less costly to operate. Servers today can do 10, 20, 30 times more VMs per physical chunk of hardware than servers two generations ago.”

Dell EMC PowerEdge servers help you deliver the applications your users require in less time by choosing the right foundation for your workload: a flexible modular solution, an application-specific reference architecture, scalable components within your own tailored design, or a preconfigured hyper-converged solution. From traditional infrastructure rack and tower servers, to modular infrastructure FX, blade and VRTX, Dell EMC

STORAGE • NETWORKING • SOFTWARE • SERVICES

TRADITIONAL

GENERAL PURPOSE DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS

MODULAR INFRASTRUCTURE

PowerEdge T series

Tower platforms

optimal for remote

offices, small and

medium businesses

Rack-optimized for

improved density in

medium and larger

businesses

Redefining modular

infrastructure for

data centers

Integrated IT for

remote and branch

office environments

Blade platform for

data centers needing

maximized density

and efficiency

Optimized for distributed

workloads, scaled-out

applications and cloud

deployment

PowerEdge R series PowerEdge M series PowerEdge C seriesPowerEdge FX PowerEdge VRTX

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WE BUILT AND LAUNCHED our SaaS on demand Sample Master® and TITAN® LIMS solution faster and more easily because of the high-performance Dell infrastructure we have in place. As a result, we can meet our customers’ demands for a cloud-based solution powered by Intel technology. And there’s definitely enough capacity for growth. We have 170 virtual machines, and we could easily add another 50 on the FX.”

Mark BurkeCIO, AcceleratedTechnology Laboratories

“

delivers optimized, energy-efficient solutions tailored to your specific workloads. Dell EMC servers integrate easily with leading cloud vendors and SDS vendors such as VMware VSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces, Red Hat and Nutanix to meet your workload requirements.

Together, Dell EMC and Intel can deliver solutions that showcase our extensive architectural collabo-ration and share a common vision for a Software- Defined Data Center that allows you to lower operational costs, build faster, enhance security and transform to cloud-ready IT.

Scaling to the cloud with Dell EMCOur versatile portfolio of systems can match the unique needs of the customer’s application, from large-scale Web and cloud deployment to mission critical enterprise applications to remote branch deployments. These scalable servers below have been used in multi-cloud environments for different use cases, all over the world.

Specifically designed to provide unsurpassed enterprise performance for CRM, ERP, OLTP and in-memory databases, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R930 server is powered by the Intel® Xeon® E7-4800 or E7-8800 processor family with a massive memory footprint, unparalleled internal storage scalability, and the ability to adapt to unknown demands of private and hybrid cloud environments.

In fact, the “tried and true” R930 with Intel® Xeon® E7-8890 V4 set a new world-record benchmark with the SAP HANA® platform, SAP BW advanced mixed workload with more than 4 billion records and a 23% improvement.2

The Dell EMC PowerEdge R730 is a versatile workhorse server that lives in thousands of data centers and has been integrated with Dell Boomi cloud application software that connects 200-plus applications and 1,000-plus endpoints, enabling business for 5,000 customers with the leading iPaaS solution. With the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family, the R730 has the processing cycles and threads as well as a large memory footprint necessary to deliver more, larger and higher-performing virtual machines for data centers and cloud platforms.

The Dell EMC Ready Node for ScaleIO combines powerful Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon processors (including the R730) and the software-defined block storage capabilities of

ScaleIO to deliver a pre-validated, tested and configured solution to help provide the best perfor-mance possible—with a single vendor for support.

Organizations can innovate faster and reduce project risk by building their VMware-based hyper-converged solutions with Virtual SAN Ready Nodes from Dell EMC. These building blocks are ready-to-order, validated configurations that can be factory integrated with Dell PowerEdge servers (such as R730 and FX2) and VMware hyper- converged software. A wide range of configurations meet the demands of diverse workloads.

The Dell EMC VxRail Appliance family is based on PowerEdge R630, R730 and R730xd and offers extreme configuration flexibility, enabling you to choose the performance, capacity and graphics capability needed to extend and simplify deploy-ment of big data analytics, high-end 2D/3D visual-ization and collaboration virtualized applications.

VxRack System with FLEX offers node options based on PowerEdge servers and is ideal for enterprise data centers that want to easily deploy a software-defined architecture optimized for a wide range of traditional enterprise workloads.

You can further optimize your data center for both modern and legacy workloads with the PowerEdge FX modular architecture, combining efficient management with flexible IT building blocks of servers, storage and networking in a converged hardware platform to ensure high productivity and service delivery.

Dell EMC Validated System for Virtualization, the industry’s most flexible converged system to date,3 features Dell PowerEdge FX2 modular servers, Active System Manger (ASM) lifecycle manage-ment and storage arrays for density in the rack, or scale-out to multiple racks.

End-to-end solutionsYou can improve the performance, productivity and availability of your data center resources with a cutting-edge portfolio of systems management solutions from Dell EMC. Get anytime/anywhere mobile access to your hardware, agent-free embedded management, extensive automation, and connections to third-party management solutions you may already use.

ASM is an open and versatile automation tool that empowers organizations to build and deploy infrastructure solutions tailored to their needs. ASM delivers the foundational capabilities that are 2. www.dell.com/learn/sr/en/srcorp1/press-

releases/2016-06-06-dell-enables-customers-to-maximize-performance

3. Based on Dell internal analysis of publicly available data from competitor websites, August 2016.

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needed for dynamic, on-demand provisioning of resources from shared pools to deliver the elasticity and nimbleness that are key expectations for a cloud solution.

For IT departments using private cloud stacks from vendors such as Microsoft and VMware, ASM integrates with the virtualization manage-ment software to fill the gaps at the infrastruc-ture layer and deliver end-to-end automation from the physical to the virtualization layer, reducing time and effort for provisioning, scaling, and remediation tasks.

Our open approach to systems management enables customers to protect and maintain existing investments in software management and IT staff training. Designed for easy installation and use, the OpenManage Essentials enterprise management staff console offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities for Dell and third-party multi- vendor hardware environments. OpenManage Essentials also automates lifecycle management operations—deployment, configuration, updates, monitoring, and maintenance—for Dell PowerEdge tower, rack, and Modular Infrastructure servers.

Leveraging the benefits of iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller technology, OpenManage Integrations

delivers automated, agent-free discovery, deploy-ment, configuration, and updates for PowerEdge servers in physical and virtualized environments managed by Microsoft System Center, VMware vCenter, and BMC BladeLogic Server Automation. Dell EMC PowerEdge customers have all the ad-vantages of OpenManage functionality maintained within their vCenter or System Center console.

With Dell EMC’s private and hybrid cloud solutions, you can transform your IT environment from in-house computing to iPaaS in the cloud. The flexible modular portfolio of intelligent platform building blocks—including Dell EMC servers, heterogeneous management tools and cloud services—enable you to get the optimized IT environment your organization is looking for. Dell EMC offers hybrid cloud, converged infrastructure, and software-defined data centers.

Boomi Integration Cloud, Virtustream, and Pivotal provide transformational solutions to manage your on- and off-premises environment. With Dell SecureWorks, you can manage your applications securely across private, public and hybrid clouds. You can adopt a cloud strategy that meets your business needs now and in the future with Dell EMC cloud solutions optimized by Intel technology.

ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL

Off-Premises Solutions

Provide the cloud services your business

needs with hosted solutions from

Dell EMC

Developer Platform

Enables you to develop and deploy

the cloud-native applications that

will drive your digital

transformation

2 3

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

Modernizes your data center

and provides the foundation

for delivering iPaaS

Native Hybrid Cloud

Offers a turnkey developer

platform that forges an easy path

to cloud-native applications and

option for data analytics

1On-Premises Solutions

Allow you to deploy a cloud-like solution inside your data center—powering your cloud-native and

traditional applications.

“One size fits all” simply won’t work for many cloud solutions. Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud solutions, powered by Intel Xeon processors include these three options:

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Dell EMC IT experts have worked with customers and business partners to create Reference Architectures and white papers to address client- specific needs for your cloud journey. Fast-track deployment guides help you easily set up your new environment.

Accelerate innovation and reduce costs and risk with end-to-end solutions optimized and validated to meet your multi-cloud requirements including virtualization, big data and analytics, high-perform- ance computing and more. With Dell EMC Validated Solutions, evaluating and acquiring simple-to-deploy, easy-to-manage solutions is easy. We offer a range of solutions with Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware technologies from turnkey to build-your-own that are tuned, optimized, validated, and supported by Dell EMC to streamline your cloud adoption.

A modern infrastructure requires reliable IT support and lifecycle services to ensure new technologies are quickly deployed and continually optimized to drive improved business results. Dell EMC can help accelerate your IT and business transformation with our world-class cloud, big data, and technology expertise and services. Our 31,000+ Dell EMC Services experts and 28,000+ services partner professionals, in more than 165 countries around the world, stand ready to serve you.

Focus on Better Business OutcomesWhether you’re operating a global organization or a small or midsized company, Dell EMC helps you adjust your solution to deliver the compute, storage and network performance needed to accelerate traditional, software-defined, and cloud workloads in your data center.

At the end of the day the goal shouldn’t simply be to get to the cloud. The goal instead should be to deliver better business outcomes, enhance efficiency, lower TCO and keep your solution safe and flexible. Your multi-cloud solutions strategy should provide you with the ultimate freedom to adapt as needed. While we can’t predict the future with exact certainty, we know flexibility and open standards are the watchwords for tomorrow’s data center. The right infrastructure design—including servers—will remain critical to ensure tomorrow’s business success. Don’t get locked into one option, talk to your Dell EMC representative about your multi-cloud infrastructure goals today.

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Copyright © February 2, 2017 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved.

WHETHER YOU’RE OPERATING A GLOBAL organization or a small or midsized company, Dell EMC helps you adjust your solution to deliver the compute, storage and network perfor-mance needed to accelerate traditional, software-defined, and cloud workloads in your data center.

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