Dell Launches vStart Private Cloud Bundles Through The Channel

Dell vStart Channel Highlights

• Offers vStart 100 and 200 through Certified Partners
• Launches in the US today, EMEA countries in September or October, Asia/Japan later
• Judges the demand for private Clouds is mature enough for smaller bundled solutions
• Will build vStart upwards and downwards – the latter with Microsoft’s Hyper-V
• Could do some very interesting appliances through its Kace division later

We managed to talk to Dell’s Richard Percaccio yesterday who gave us bloggers a pre-briefing on today’s announcement. We wanted to write something up here, because Dell has been one of our most popular subjects. We’ve written about their market position , Cloud Offerings (including vStart) and PartnerDirect redesign recently, as well as covering them as one of the key PC and systems vendors since the on set of our work. A view of Dell’s revenues for its major product offerings are shown in Figure 1.

What Is Dell Announcing?

vStart is a pre-integrated cabinet build on rack servers, storage from its EqualLogic acquisition and PowerConnect network switches from its OEM partnership with Juniper, along with integrated software offering configurations with preset numbers of Vmware virtual machines (100 and 200 initially, which are also the vStart model numbers). For users building private Cloud facilities Dell claims to have taken 46 steps out of the equivalent ‘bare metal’ deployment.
Dell announced last week that its Equallogic iSCSI NAS boxes would include Exanet’s file system (now named Dell Scalable File System) – effectively turning them all into SANs. It wasn’t a great surprise as Dell already had a road map for moving its Compellent stage to the same file system. Clearly as a bundled Cloud solution vStart requires an integrated file system. So its announcements seem to be clicking into place.

vStart Channel Availability Will Be Staged – US First

Richard described the details of the offering. Initially it will be available through Dell’s ‘Certified’ partners only, making it an inspirational product for those who are just ‘Registered’ he believes. He also described the pricing schemes which have a clever set of rules for rewarding first movers. The price paid by the partner to Dell will be significantly less than that charged by subsequent partners selling into the same account or Dell’s direct sales force.
Availability is being staged, with the US coming in today, followed by EMA Countries in September or October (we suspect Germany, France and the UK); Richard noted that availability in Dells Asia/Japan region would come ‘eventually’.

PartnerDirect Channels Have Medium Company
Targets

Dell is developing its channel having started with a direct selling approach. We believe its channel will be better equipped to sell to medium sized companies (for us those with between 100 and 1,000 employees) at first, with its direct sales force focusing on Enterprises (large companies with more than 1k employees). Although it will launch a new lower-end version later, its channel has far less capabilities than HP’s in selling to small companies.

Some Conclusions – Channel Managed Services, Kace, ‘vStart 50 and 400

IBM, HP, Fujitsu and Dell itself (in its DCS division) have been keen to help large customers understand, prepare for and implement private Clouds for the last two years. Some have also put together bundles (IBM’s Cloud Burst and HP’s Matrix), although we suspect these have not yet been tremendously successful. Dell clearly judges that now is the time for it to make money in this area – that the market has matured enough for bundled solutions.
vStart 100 and 200 are simplified solutions which should help end-users and partners developing intricate expertise in tying server, storage, networking, systems management and virtualisation software together to make their own systems. Dell has announced its intentions to scale the solution upwards (400) and downwards (50 with Microsoft Hyper-V).
If the partner itself is in the managed services market many vStart implementations will no doubt be in their own data centres, running systems for customers off-premise. For partners who want to offer their own Cloud services, in the Disaster Recovery and Backup areas for instance, vStart could also be appropriate (although they might need to be clever to negotiate a channel margin from Dell for implementing an internal system).
Knowing Kace’s systems management approach, Dell could clearly build on vStart to deliver some very interesting appliance approaches to private Clouds: but this for now is pure speculation our part.
Our reservations about Dell’s announcement are in the areas of Internationalisation and its channel’s somewhat restricted scope. Both should give its competitors time to launch their own bundled solutions through their own channels. In general this is an interesting announcement, underlining the growing maturity of Cloud Computing and the Channel’s own challenges to shift from physical logistics to virtual services.
Are you a medium company or department of a larger one considering building a private Cloud? What to you think of the alternatives? Would you buy one from a VAR? We’re very interested in your views – so please contact us by commenting below.