Dell announces Emerging Solutions Ecosystem cloud partnership

Dell has launched a new partnership programme with the aim of focusing on cloud and big data enablement.

Its new Emerging Solutions Ecosystem expands on previous efforts around the Hadoop big data framework and the OpenStack open source cloud platform. The move was prompted by heavy customer interest in Dell’s OpenStack-powered Cloud Solution, the company said.

Dell said the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem will enable expansion of the scope of those solutions and to continue to meet customer needs. “As a result, customers can benefit even more from deploying these enhanced and validated solutions, which are optimised for maximum performance and scalability, and provide a single point of contact with whom to interact,” the company said in a statement.

The company announced three new strategic partners that would be taking part within the program; Canonical, enStratus and Mirantis.

Martin Stadtler, director of global support and services at Canonical said his company would be working within the partnership to “help deliver enhanced engineering, online and professional services to Ubuntu partners and customers worldwide."

EnStratus will offer its cloud infrastructure management solution to the program. With the deal, enStratus will be used by Dell to deliver applications with consistent governance and automation as well as infrastructure automation, including auto-scaling, automated backups, and automated recovery.

Mirantis is providing the programme with custom architecture and design for OpenStack clouds as well as deployment of custom OpenStack architectures. It will also help with services to migrate existing applications to the cloud.

Analysts said that the partnerships and program around OpenStack was validation of the growing importance of openness towards cloud computing.

“The ascendency of open approaches, be they from OpenStack, CloudStack or others is a positive development for those wishing for more choice when it comes to cloud,” said Ben Kepes, analyst at research firm Diversity. “The flip side of this choice however is a more complex set of management requirements.”