HCI is slowly emerging in enterprise applications: Amit Luthra, Dell Technologies

Here, Amit Luthra, Director & GM – Data Centre Solutions, Dell Technologies India, talks about HCI and other things, going forward. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What does Dell Technologies have to offer when it comes to HCI?

Amit Luthra: When it comes to HCI, we provide a simple, cost effective hyper converged solution that solves a wide range of current challenges and supports almost any use case, including tier-one applications and mixed workloads. We have recently announced VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell Technologies VxRail - a fast and easy path to deploy and operate hybrid cloud through a fully integrated platform.

The recent updates to VxRail enable faster, better, and simpler delivery of virtual desktops, business-critical applications, and remote office infrastructure. In addition, VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail allows management of all cloud operations through a familiar set of tools, offering a consistent experience, across all cloud workloads. VxRail is the only fully integrated, preconfigured, and tested HCI appliance powered by VMware vSAN and is the standard for transforming VMware infrastructures.

DQ: Can you elaborate on Dell Technologies’ journey in HCI?

Amit Luthra: We have been able to maintain our leading position in HCI year after year – making our journey in HCI noteworthy. In the fourth quarter of 2019, Dell Technologies extended the company’s massive hyper-converged industry share gap between itself and all competitors, winning one-third of the global market. Thanks to the continued growth of VxRail and HCI portfolio, we were able to lead with $760m revenues, up 37.6%, and 33.3% share of the industry.

Moreover, we continue to expand our HCI leadership by introducing innovative products to our portfolio, based on customer feedback, and by delivering the fastest and simplest paths to achieving IT outcomes, innovation and business goals. We do this through industry leading and trusted technologies, close collaborations for tightly integrating offerings, and the industry’s most diverse portfolio that enables us to offer incredible solutions for any type of computing environment and customer preference.

DQ: What is your secret behind maintaining no. 1 position in the market?

Amit Luthra: At Dell Technologies, we believe that the only way to maintain leadership is by ensuring customer delight. There is nothing more important to us than our customers and hence we have recently been named a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for HCI.

We work with our customers closely to help them modernize their IT infrastructure so that they can stay competitive. Additionally, we help them increase their productivity, performance, scalability and reduce their hardware footprint in their data center through our HCI solutions.

Hyper Converged Infrastructure is slowly emerging in enterprise applications, along with bringing new opportunities in the market. Starting from finance to manufacturing, IT and ITeS, telecom and government, we have several small and larger companies as customers in India.

DQ: What is the difference between Dell Technologies’ and other competitors HCI solutions?

Amit Luthra: Our strength in HCI lies in the breadth of our portfolio. Dell Technologies’ HCI helps customers transform their operations with turnkey integrated systems that accelerate IT outcomes. Customers can also continue to leverage existing operating models while gaining HCI benefits through flexible, pre-validated HCI building blocks. They can choose from simple appliances or rack scale ready-made end to end HCI based solution.

Our portfolio is built on the pillars of modern IT: flash, cloud-enabled, scale-out and software-defined technologies - helping organisations accomplish complex workloads with ease and agility. Additionally, our HCI solution helps organisations to scale as business expands and operate more efficiently.

Moreover, our portfolio is built on industry-leading PowerEdge servers to deliver cloud-like agility, scalability and simplified IT management. Customers can chose from simple appliances or rack scale ready-made end-to-end HCI based solution. We offer a simple and clearly defined path to private, hybrid and multi-clouds to help our customers transform their IT infrastructure to free up valuable staff time while enabling IT to be the enabler for faster, nimbler businesses.

Customers can chose any Dell Technologies platform to build their cloud, while at the same time, they can also buy complete solutions like EHC and Azure stack and cut deployment times into less than half. In addition we differentiate ourselves in packaging our solutions. Our solutions come with data protection, disaster recovery and data backup solutions in-built with lowest bandwidth.

DQ: What is the future roadmap of the company?

Amit Luthra: Over time, technologies have matured to encompass customers of all sizes, complexity and workloads.  Our key priority is to ensure comprehensive portfolio of products and solutions to our customers to help in their IT transformation journey. As mentioned earlier, our strength lies in the range, breadth and depth of our product line. We are enabling human kind with the right technologies in a cost-effective and simplified manner.

Talking about the adoption of converged and hyper-converged infrastructure in India – It is expected to grow significantly as these systems can help address some of the critical challenges faced in today’s fast growing IT landscape. Organizations are fixing scalability needs by adding resources, but this process is getting complex. They are also looking for complete open environment, so that they can plug and play the required resources without any integration challenges and be more flexible to organizational needs.

Moving forward, we will continue to bring in innovations with an aim to provide best-in class solutions to our customers - helping them drive better business outcomes and stay relevant.