Dell Technologies Inc. made a number of announcements this week that, at first glance, boosted a cloud infrastructure portfolio that it launched last year. A closer examination of the latest news reveals trends and market positioning among several of the world’s largest technology players that will be interesting to watch as the year plays out.

Dell’s releases included a partnership with Google Cloud to simplify management of private and public cloud storage. The two companies have teamed up to launch general availability for Dell Technologies Cloud OneFS for Google Cloud, which combines Dell’s Isilon file storage with Google Cloud’s analytics and compute services.

“Our Isilon customers have been asking us for a long time to bring this type of capability to the cloud,” said Joe CaraDonna, vice president of engineering technology at Dell Technologies. “They want to bring high-performance workloads to the cloud, but they need a scalable file system that can keep up with the demand, and that’s what we set out to solve.”

CaraDonna spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Rich Sanzi, vice president of engineering at Google Cloud. Miniman also spoke with Chhandomay Mandal, director of product marketing at Dell Technologies, and Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at Dell Technologies in separate interviews. They discussed how the latest partnership addresses speed and scalability, improved Kubernetes and bandwidth support, a new midrange storage system, and growing signs of price pressure in the cloud market. (* Disclosure below.)

Increased scale and speed

Dell’s partnership with Google Cloud is aimed at the hybrid market, a cornerstone of its platform launched one year ago. Customers can now connect Isilon systems running OneFS file storage with Google Cloud environments without having to endure complex technical modifications at the same time.

“Customers are looking for scalable solutions which enable them to bring their existing applications to the cloud and not have to make a ton of changes,” Sanzi explained. “It is a full fidelity solution that has the performance and scale of what customers are expecting from on-premises. That’s one of the things that’s great about the Dell offering.”

Speed is also a key factor in this latest partnership. An ESG Research study commissioned by Dell found significant increases in read/write capabilities for OneFS.

“Results for throughput were 200 gigabits per second on the read and 100 gigabits per second on the write,” CaraDonna said. “These are game-changing numbers. It’s numbers like that that enable compute intensive high-performance workloads in Google Cloud.”

Watch the complete interview with CaraDonna and Sanzi below:

Ties with VMware

Dell also signaled its continued interest in deepening integration with VMware’s technology as it pursued the hybrid market, which happened to coincide with Google’s interest as well. Dell’s latest moves come one week after Google Cloud’s introduction of VMware Engine, designed to provide a fully managed stack with VMware Cloud Foundation.

This week’s news from Dell included embedding Kubernetes natively into VMware’s vSphere. Dell’s Cloud Platform will now provide a direct path to the popular container orchestration tool with workload support on Dell EMC VxRail infrastructure.

“You can run your applications on any cloud while having data sitting outside of your cloud with the high-performance, high-speed access that you need,” Mandal said. “That’s where we are bringing the innovation and the value.”

Recognizing that the global pandemic has placed much higher demand for features such as video streaming and virtual connectivity, Dell also announced that it would update its Dell EMC SD-WAN Solution powered by VMware. This will give customers more appliance and bandwidth capability.

Reducing fees

One of the subplots in the current cloud computing world saga involves cost, specifically the expense of moving data out of cloud environments. This charge is commonly known in the industry as a data egress fee, and it has not attracted a lot of attention in the past. But when the pandemic suddenly forced millions onto video-streaming platforms, it has emerged as a much bigger deal.

Evidence for this can be seen in Zoom Inc.’s announcement last month that it had signed a new cloud contract not with one of the “big three” providers, but with Oracle Corp. Zoom revealed that it planned to process 7 million gigabytes of data through Oracle’s cloud on a daily basis. Oracle indicated that it had offered another customer — 8×8 Inc. — an 80% discount.

It attracted only a brief mention in January, but when Dell EMC previously updated its Isilon OneFS file system to support Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute Local, the company also said that any data written back to Isilon would not incur egress fees.

“This is a Dell and Microsoft Azure partnership, so that’s where you do not get charged with the egress fee when the application is running in Azure and connecting back to our Dell EMC storage as part of the cloud services,” Mandal confirmed.

Watch the complete interview with Mandal below:

Cloud-related costs are being reduced in other areas as well. Earlier this month, Dell launched PowerStore, a new midrange storage system that connects with Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services.

Dell has indicated that PowerStore is priced to compete in a market that also includes major players such as Pure Storage Inc., NetApp Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

“Customers in specific industries or with specific workloads are really looking for flexibility to leverage certain capabilities on-premises or in the cloud,” Vigil said. “PowerStore is delivering that cloud-like, simple-to-use, simple-to-scale experience, but on-premises.”

Watch the complete video interview with Vigil below:

In the end, this is all about data — the coin of the realm — and the physics, complexity and cost involved to move it around in a multicloud world. Dell appears to be raising the ante by offering solutions that address all three of these key factors. As the year nears its midpoint, it will be interesting to see how other large tech powerhouses respond.

“One challenge we are seeing is how customers move data around from one cloud to another so they can take advantage of the great innovation that is happening with cloud storage or cloud providers,” Mandal said. “Solving this customer challenge is the number-one priority in the cloud-offering space.”

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of enterprise technology, digital transformation, and cultures of innovation. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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