Dell’s New Cloud Partnerships With Red Hat, Azure, CenturyLink and DropBox
Dell has made headlines in 2013 for becoming a privately owned company. Now that Dell is free from the constraints of being a publically traded company, the provider of PC hardware has shifted its focus from the desktop hardware to building out and managing cloud infrastructure for its corporate clients. Both Red Hat and Dell have common goals and each can complement each other as they both try to grow in the cloud sector. The companies have partnered up on several different projects in the past. With this partnership, Dell has basically become the first company to offer Red Hat Enterprise OpenStack cloud outside of Red Hat offering it themselves.
Dell’s ambitious cloud computing goals are highlighted by this close relationship with Red Hat. Dell has also announced partnerships with other well-known hybrid cloud offerings such as Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink’s and DropBox. Since Dell account executives are still deeply entrenched with many companies that may not have migrated to the cloud yet, it is possible that the account executives could present decision makers with custom tailored hybrid cloud solutions that are scalable and save on costs.
In their arrangement with Red Hat, Dell will sell server hardware with Red Hat’s OpenStack already installed on the device. Dell hopes to provide an “Out of the box” cloud solution where its customers can just bolt their new Dell servers into the rack and be up and running with their own private cloud. Dell’s other partnerships will allow these private cloud users to use a hybrid solution. Dell is working closely with Red Hat in order to be able to use public clouds such as Azure, Google and Amazon alongside of Dell and Red Hat’s OEM private cloud infrastructure. For example, if a company required more computing power than available, these bursts could then be offloaded on to Microsoft Azure in order for the task to be completed.
