Dell EMC Automates Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Using VMware vRealize Suite to Deliver Services Faster

Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage, and data protection technologies. This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions. Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 98 percent of the Fortune 500 – with the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud. The company is headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and is a major player in the technology industry, providing solutions that help businesses manage their IT infrastructure more efficiently. With a focus on delivering IT as a service, Dell EMC aims to provide its customers with the tools they need to succeed in a rapidly changing technological landscape.

Managing seven data centers around the world is no minor feat. Just ask Paul DiVittorio, senior director of cloud infrastructure for Dell EMC. “We run applications supporting our 70,000 internal users 24/7, around the globe,” says DiVittorio. “We’re running close to 20,000 virtual machines and store more than 40 petabytes of data.” To keep up with its changing business needs, Dell EMC embarked on an ambitious data center transformation. It began that journey with virtualization from VMware, first consolidating and then converging the Dell EMC infrastructure. “We’re now 98 percent virtualized and have achieved cost savings while optimizing our IT environment,” says DiVittorio. Today, the company is deploying an enterprise hybrid cloud infrastructure, with VMware vRealize Suite at the very heart of the reference architecture. “Now it’s time to continue our evolution to data center automation and IT as a service,” explains DiVittorio. Dell EMC was burdened with lengthy processes for provisioning of services, where 85 percent of IT tasks were manual. “Our goal is to take that manual effort and automate it,” says DiVittorio. Greater automation would allow the IT department to accelerate the provisioning of new IT services and become a true service provider. “We want to give our internal customers— Dell EMC employees—an even better experience than they would get with an external cloud services provider,” says DiVittorio.

To support an IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) model, DiVittorio and his team needed to build an infrastructure with Software-Defined Storage, virtual networking, security, and full chargeback capabilities. The result of this effort was the creation of what Dell EMC calls the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC). This solution is based on the VMware Software-Defined Data Center architecture and Dell EMC ViPR, a Software-Defined Storage solution. The EHC platform is consolidated, scaled-out, tiered, multitenant, and 100 percent virtualized. In addition to taking advantage of VMware vSphere® cloud infrastructure and VMware NSX network virtualization for networking and security, Dell EMC deployed solutions within the VMware vRealize Suite, including: VMware vRealize Operations for operations management, VMware vRealize Automation for automation management, VMware vRealize Log Insight™, and VMware vRealize Business for Cloud Standard. “It's a set of pre-engineered software that all works together,” says DiVittorio. “We definitely wanted to take a buy versus build approach to our cloud infrastructure.” The new infrastructure provides a comprehensive ITaaS solution for managing day-to-day operations, including troubleshooting, capacity planning, performance monitoring, and workload placement. It also allows Dell EMC to quickly provision and deliver network and security services that work in lockstep with compute and storage services—all from a single pane. “All new applications and services will be provisioned through our EHC environment,” says DiVittorio. “Today we’re rolling out the environment for our IT practitioners, with our vRealize Automation catalog as the portal for them to consume IT services.”

• With automation, DiVittorio expects provisioning time to drop dramatically. “We are building the blueprints and templates that will allow us to deliver a ready-to-use virtual machine in a matter of minutes,” he says. “Before, provisioning what I call a useful service—with authentication, load balancing, storage, firewall, and more—would take as long as 45 days. With automation, we’re shrinking that down to same-day delivery.” That gives business units more flexibility to react quickly to new opportunities.
• In addition to providing faster provisioning, EHC helps Dell EMC deliver a better user experience to its internal customers. “With vRealize Automation, we can abstract away details about resources and simplify our offerings,” says DiVittorio. “If a customer needs a framework for a three-tiered application, we can create a template so that all the customer has to do is push one button.” Now developers who need IT resources can be sure that the template provisions everything they might need.
• Another major benefit for Dell EMC is automatic management of the hybrid cloud environment. “We want the system to make real-time decisions for us,” says DiVittorio. “With vRealize Suite, we can set performance characteristics and let the platform maintain those performance goals.” This enables Dell EMC to offer different service levels for varying business requirements without requiring additional IT staff to manage them.
• The real-time analytics that the vRealize solution provides helps Dell EMC make better decisions and save money. “We have greater insight into our capacity today than we did even three years ago,” says DiVittorio. “That helps us make smarter decisions on when and what hardware to buy. Just in the past year, we avoided purchasing 100 servers because we had tighter capacity and better management of performance and workload placement through vRealize Operations.”

• Reduces time to provision from 45 days to same-day delivery
• Achieved optimized utilization of 80 percent
• Charges back 90 percent of operational expenses