Dell is offering a private cloud product that doesn’t behave like the private clouds people are used to. Instead of tying customers to one software stack or platform, the new service lets them build private clouds using tools from VMware, Nutanix, and Red Hat on Dell’s hardware.
The company calls this Dell Private Cloud, though it’s more of a flexible setup tool than a finished solution. It gives users the ability to choose a software stack and deploy it on Dell’s disaggregated infrastructure — meaning the servers, storage, and networking are separate rather than bundled into one fixed system.
This approach is meant to give companies more control over how they build and run private clouds. It also supports reusing existing hardware, which can lower costs and reduce waste. A built-in catalogue of tested system designs — what Dell calls “validated blueprints” — helps guide the setup.
Dell says the automation tools in this platform can cut the setup process down by 90 per cent. A new cluster, they claim, can be deployed in under three hours with no manual steps. This is all managed through the Dell Automation Platform, which handles everything from onboarding to ongoing updates.
“The flexibility to transition between cloud ecosystems and the ability to repurpose hardware is a game-changer for us by providing investment protection and enabling us to respond to evolving business needs quickly,” said Keith Bradley, vice president of IT and Security at Nature Fresh Farms.
As reported by The Register, the subscription-based offering gives users access to these validated blueprints, which can be deployed across any available Dell servers and storage. While multiple stacks can’t run on the same server, they can operate across the broader infrastructure fleet. Centralised management tools make it easier to coordinate resources across environments.
Licenses for the cloud software can be brought in by the customer or bought through Dell. For now, the VMware option is limited to vSphere — not VMware Cloud Foundation, which Broadcom has been pushing. Dell says other options will be added later in the year.
Keith Townsend, an analyst who previewed the Automation Platform, said on LinkedIn that it represents “a young vision for modular infrastructure between private cloud stacks,” and shows Dell’s interest in moving away from tight links to VMware.
Dell’s term for the whole concept is “disaggregated infrastructure.” It’s part of a broader move away from hyperconverged systems, which are typically tied to a single hypervisor and hard to break apart.
The company is also applying similar automation to edge deployments. The Dell Native Edge tool supports VM snapshots, backups, migrations, and policy-driven load balancing. These tools work with Dell’s own equipment as well as hardware from other vendors.
All of this was announced during Dell Technologies World, the company’s annual event. It also used the stage to talk about AI hardware. Dell’s servers are now tuned to meet Nvidia’s “AI Factory” standards and can work with the newest accelerators from Nvidia and AMD.
To deal with the higher heat these systems produce, Dell is rolling out the PowerCool Enclosed Rear Door Heat Exchanger. It claims the system can cut cooling costs by up to 60 per cent. The setup includes a rack controller that tracks temperature and handles all rack-level devices. It even has leak detection for liquid cooling, which is becoming more common.
Dell also showed off a new laptop, the Pro Max Plus, that includes a Qualcomm AI chip with 32 AI cores. The company says it can run large AI models locally — the kind usually handled in the cloud. Nvidia has been making similar moves with its DGX Spark AI desktops.
(Photo by Unsplash)
See also: Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent: China’s cloud powerhouses target the Middle East
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