Today at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, FL, Dell EMC announced a series of updates further supporting Microsoft data center environments. These updates were included Dell EMC XC Series, Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, and Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server. The above mentioned products span hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) to hybrid cloud and data analysis demonstrating Dell EMC’s commitment to customers operating in Microsoft environments.





Today at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, FL, Dell EMC announced a series of updates further supporting Microsoft data center environments. These updates were included Dell EMC XC Series, Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, and Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server. The above mentioned products span hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) to hybrid cloud and data analysis demonstrating Dell EMC’s commitment to customers operating in Microsoft environments.

Dell EMC’s XC Series are HCI appliances ideal for running virtualized workloads. Customers can run their virtualized workloads on their choice of hypervisor, including Microsoft Hyper-V. There has been an uptick in the popularity for running Microsoft workloads, including SQL, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint on the XC Series. Noting this Dell EMC has made a series of updates and improvements, including:

Dell EMC XC Series Data Protection Management Console, which is launched from within the XC Series management interface and integrates and simplifies data protection operation and automation across XC Series deployments. This offers complete data protection capabilities with Dell EMC Avamar VE running on XC Series clusters and backup to Dell EMC Data Domain and cloud tiering to Virtustream and Microsoft Azure. IT admins gain the ability to quickly and easily monitor and manage backups for multiple XC Series clusters while utilizing best of breed Dell EMC technologies in one turnkey solution.

Optimization for Microsoft Windows 2016 Hyper-V plus Azure, available at no additional cost to customers, including support for Windows Hyper-V 2016 with insights into XC Series clusters. The XC Series Azure Log Analytics Solution provides integration of XC Series into customer’s OMS-based data center automation tools, enabling insights such as trend analysis and behavioral anomaly detection.

Another big announcement for Microsoft Azure customers today is that Dell EMC has been approved to deliver Azure through the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Direct and Indirect Microsoft partner model worldwide. This approval comes from the company’s proven track record of global expertise of both Azure and hybrid cloud platform. Dell EMC can now offer comprehensive, end-to-end Azure Stack hybrid cloud solutions, including Azure services and solutions, to both customers and channel partners globally. And this same note, Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack is now shipping.

On the hardware side of things, Dell EMC has added support for Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers to the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server and the Dell EMC Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes. This will give customers more powerful compute performance capabilities. Unity Storage has also been added to the Dell Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL Server. According to Dell EMC, adding Unity gives customers high performance and affordable flash optimized architecture that supports several of VMs while delivering high IOPS at low latency for running demanding Microsoft SQL Server workloads.

Availability

Dell EMC XC Series updates and the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Microsoft SQL and Dell EMC Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes updates are expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2017.

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