For quite a while now, Dell has been building machines with embedded VMware. You can buy a Dell box and it comes with virtualization already installed. The big news this week: Dell announced that the company is expanding its cloud-related offerings. They’re forging closer relationships with cloud providers, giving them the hardware they need to build new clouds.
Dell highlighted Microsoft and its Azure platform as one of the leading partners. But in general, what this means is that Dell is making it easier for more companies to build good clouds with good hardware from trusted vendors. They are hardly the only players in this space. EMC also sells hardware that enables other companies to set up their own clouds—AT&T is one example. For Nasuni, these new clouds are a welcome development.
Why? These companies are basically making arms for arms dealers, enabling others to build both storage and compute clouds. Once those clouds are built, though, people will need a way to access them. And this is where Nasuni enters the picture. Dell makes it easy to start building virtualization platforms, even your own cloud grid, and there are some serviceable, free products out there, but nothing that matches the Nasuni Filer for security, performance, and functionality.
In Dell’s platform, you can create a Filer and get immediate cloud access, plus all the added benefits of the Nasuni appliance—snapshots, local-like performance, and more. One Dell official noted that security can be a problem in the cloud, and that his company has left it to others to address some of these issues. That’s us. Here at Nasuni, we are very, very serious about delivering strong security.
We are excited about these new cloud offerings because in the long run, our customers will have more choices. One of the strengths of the Filer is that it is flexible. We can support a range of platforms already, and when a new one emerges, if we are unable to support it immediately, we can adapt the Filer very quickly to make it work.
Currently we have announced four cloud partners, but there are more coming. In all, we have integrated to twelve different platforms already, and we hope to roll many of them out in the coming months. Stay tuned.