VMware and Dell EMC Simplify, Automate, and Protect Your Organization

As companies are facing increasingly distributed ecosystems, the need for companies to protect their virtual environments from Day 1 is becoming exponentially more important.  It is simpler for companies to adopt the modern software-defined data center (SDDC) to deal with the explosive data growth and sprawl resulting from the digital transformation.  Together, VMware and Dell EMC are creating a virtual ecosystem for customers that makes the cloud invisible to their users, enabling them to worry less about tedious tasks associated with backups and focus on transforming their business.

Mark Stockham, Business Development Manager for Data Protection from Dell EMC, and Vipul Shah, Sr. Director of Product Management for Multi-Cloud Management, recently presented the new and exciting data protection capabilities for vRealize environments.  The webinar started with Vipul Shah discussing how vRealize is the multi-cloud platform of the future.  Data protection has never been easier for your virtual machines (VMs).  With application operations, programmable provisioning, cloud automation services, and self-driving capabilities for the private, hybrid, and public cloud, vRealize has enabled companies to run and protect their VMs per their specifications, wherever it may reside.

Vipul then transitioned into what’s new with vRealize Automation (vRA) 7.5.  With new features that make it even easier to operate across the cloud environments while being built for developers, the latest version of the software demonstrates the evolution of the VMware portfolio.  VMware now gives its users the choice to consume management either on-premises or through SaaS while providing IT automation to the cloud administrators and support developers.

Mark Stockham then had the opportunity to present and transitioned into discussing Dell EMC Data Protection solutions for vRealize environments.  Virtualized workloads are being backed up in a software-defined approach, even though companies are still working on-premises, cloud, and multi-cloud environments to cater how you want to consume resources.  Dell EMC offers comprehensive and seamless data protection integration into VMware interfaces, lowering OPEX, enabling greater operator efficiency, and minimizing the storage footprint for more efficient and cost-effective data management.

Dell EMC also provides software-defined backup and recovery options for your virtual ecosystem.  To reduce OPEX costs and time needed to manage your data protection, the data protection architecture is critical when virtualized or cloud deployed.  Dell EMC provides automation across the entire data protection stack for comprehensive automation, elegant scalability, faster backups and restores, best-in-class data deduplication, and simple customizable management.  Proxy machines are based next to the virtual machines so as to take the workload out of the network and lower bandwidth requirements, which is particularly important when dealing with cloud environments.  Make sure that what’s going on in the background in efficient too.

Dell EMC Data Protection solutions supports IaaS or PaaS ecosystems and can set dynamic policies for the VMware SDDC based on VM names, tags, and other criteria.  IT Admins can set up policies, retention periods, tags, expiration dates, replication targets, and much more, giving self-service capabilities to companies over their data protection.  With auto deploy, software-defined data protection automates the rules used to identify and track resources in the SDDC, enabling automatic inclusion or exclusion of VMs.  With Data Protection Suite for VMware, a company’s recovery options are flexible to configure and restore based on their specific business objectives.  Application consistent backups ensure that businesses can restore their mission-critical applications.

The Dell EMC vRA Data Protection Extension delivers Backup-as-as-Service (BaaS) and self-service data protection for VMware environments.  The extension offers data protection natively as part of vRA Advanced Services and all tasks occur from within the vRA UI.  Data protection is embedded into the blueprints, ensuring that VMs are automatically protected during the deployment of applications and compute services.  The extension also supports application consistent backup and recovery through built-in agents.  This solution is deployable today through the VMware Solution Exchange.  Together, VMware vRealize Suite and Dell EMC data protection offer automation, governance, and compliance for users with the deepest integration points for your customers cloud orchestration portal.

To show how easy it is to deploy, the webinar concluded with a demo on installing and running the Dell EMC data protection plug-in for vRealize Orchestrator.  After installing the plug-in to the latest version, IT Admins can immediate start protecting VMs with pre-loaded configurations.  Just another way that Dell EMC makes protecting data that much easier.

Dell EMC OEM Onboard with Smart Maritime Council

New industry forum provides knowledge sharing platform

The shipping industry is desperate for trusted navigators to chart a course for these technology enablers, all of which will deliver real transformational power. And so, when the industry’s ecosystem comes together to ensure that shipping companies’ real-world operational requirements are driving the development of big data, the Industrial Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics, and secured ledgers, we transform into real shipmates. Actually, I think “shipmates” is a great analogy to describe the work being carried out by the Smart Maritime Network. Together, we are exploring common goals and the standardization of IT systems for the shipping sector. In this endeavor, we’re all guided by the same compass, working to support both shipowners and operators.

Simplifying the route to customer value and sustainable competitive advantage

Whether it’s using the blockchain to secure customs transactions, data management tools for logistics and scheduling planning, real-time equipment monitoring for predictive maintenance, video surveillance for safety and risk management or IoT analytics to ensure cold chain reefer managements, as an industry, we are working together to make it smooth sailing, simplifying the route to customer value and sustainable competitive advantage.

Looking to the horizon

In my book, it’s critically important that shipping companies’ benefit from the new opportunities afforded by technology. This collaboration is exactly why Dell EMC OEM is proud to be one of the founding partners of the Smart Maritime Network and Council. We plan to hold a further five meetings during 2019 in different global maritime centers. The outcomes from these meetings will be shared with the wider maritime industry through a series of four regional conferences to be held throughout the year, beginning in Athens on May 9. Watch this space – it’s all hands now on deck!