For much of the past year, Dell Technologies Inc. has been leveraging its relationship with VMware Inc. to advance the hyperconverged infrastructure in meeting the multicloud demands of its customers. Recent announcements from Dell now appear to be aimed at taking that approach to the “extreme.”

In a series of announcements made as part of the Dell HCI Digital Launch, the company added details to a set of its latest moves under the theme of “Taking HCI to Extremes.” The latest release is built on the strength of VxRail, VMware Cloud Foundation and Dell’s leading position in the hyperconverged space.

“VxRail is integral to the Dell Technologies cloud strategy,” said Jon Siegal (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing at Dell. “VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail equals the Dell Technologies cloud platform. It’s operational consistency across any cloud, whether it’s on-premises, on the edge, or in the public cloud.”

Siegal spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Dell HCI Digital Launch. He was joined by Chad Dunn (pictured, right), vice president of product management HCI at Dell. Miniman also spoke with Richard Gagnon, chief information officer for the City of Amarillo, Texas, in a separate interview. They discussed Dell’s latest offerings to facilitate deployment of HCI in extreme environments, easing the barrier of entry to hybrid cloud, hardware and lifecycle enhancements, and the impact of VxRail in assisting customers during a global pandemic. (* Disclosure below.)

Deployment in harsh conditions

One of Dell’s latest actions was to announce that VxRail and HCI can now be brought to the most extreme environments. A ruggedized VxRail D Series model was introduced for remote, harsh environments, enabling the deployment of a temperature resilient and shock-resistant data center for mobile command bases, manufacturing environments or even submarines.

“It’s driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute, performance and storage out in the edges or some of these more exotic locations,” Dunn said. “We built this D series to enable you to get to extreme locations, with extreme heat, cold, altitude, but still offer operational simplicity.”

In addition to bringing Dell’s hyperconverged platform to extreme environments, the company also took steps to lower the barrier to entry for the hybrid cloud. Customers can now deploy VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail using a consolidated, four compute node architecture to support multiple, general purpose virtualized workloads. A more involved eight-node, standard architecture is also now available for dedicated workload domains, such as Horizon VDI and vSphere with Kubernetes.

Users will also have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management along with traditional virtual machine-based workloads, all made available via VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 on VxRail 7.0.

“Now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications,” Siegal said. “The Dell Technologies cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall when it comes to VxRail.”

Hardware and lifecycle offerings

Dell strengthened its hardware offerings with the addition of AMD EPYC processors on the VxRail E Series platform, integration of computer graphics capabilities with the Nvidia Quadro RTX 8000 GPU, and VxRail support for Intel Optane Persistent Memory. Optane offers the ability to maintain data integrity when power is lost.

The latest news from Dell also includes automated lifecycle management with VxRail, an important consideration for customers such as the city of Amarillo, Texas, which operates without the luxury of extensive pre-release testing environments.

“I’ve worked for multibillion-dollar companies where we had massive quality and assurance environments that replicated production,” said Gagnon. “We simply can’t afford that in local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down quality and assurance and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change.”

Watch the complete video interview with Gagnon below:

Turnkey experience

Amarillo’s experience highlights an important component of VxRail’s value proposition for Dell’s customers. VxRail’s HCI System Software streamlines updates by running health checks when necessary and enabling a VxRail cluster to be maintained throughout its lifecycle. More testing and maintenance by Dell means less work for its customers.

“There’s a massive amount of testing of each of the components to make sure they operate together in a validated state,” Dunn noted. “This has always been our bread and butter, and it gets even more important the larger the deployments become when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware, software and firmware combinations.”

A turnkey HCI experience that includes automation and lifecycle management has been especially helpful during the global pandemic. As companies and local governments scrambled this spring to create remote work environments practically overnight, having a solution that could meet demand with flexibility and speed became critical.

“With VxRail in place, we spun up hundreds of instant clones; we spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half for public health,” Gagnon recalled. “It’s given us the flexibility to roll out new solutions very quickly. What I’m seeing is those of my customers who were a little lagging or conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing how they do business because it makes them more adaptable as well.”

Adaptability has emerged as a key theme in 2020. Dell’s focus on leveraging VxRail to address a broad range of traditional and modern applications across core, edge and cloud has provided a useful accompaniment at an important time.

“The range of workloads and flexibility of VxRail is really helping our existing customers through this pandemic,” Siegal said. “There are genomics companies we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities in the Netherlands doing antibody detection. We are here to help — that’s been our message to our customers, but it’s been amazing to see how they are helping us.”

Watch the complete video interview on the Dell HCI Digital Launch announcements below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Dell HCI Digital Launch. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE