- Dell debuted a new Private Cloud offering for enterprises that will be available later this year
- The product lets enterprises deploy their software of choice for hypervisors and cloud OS
- Analysts said the idea isn't new, but the application is compelling
Bye, bye vendor lock-in, hello open private cloud. Dell this week unveiled a new private cloud offering that will allow enterprises to run their software of choice on its hardware, a move that is somehow simultaneously both unoriginal and revolutionary.
Dell Private Cloud, which will become generally available in the back half of this year, pairs the company’s disaggregated infrastructure with whatever software an enterprise wants to use – be it Broadcom (erm, VMware), Red Hat and Nutanix. It also allows enterprises to bring their own cloud OS licenses and provides zero-touch onboarding of compute and storage, centralized inventory management, Dell AIOps and automated provisioning.
In practice, this setup will enable enterprises to decommission and reprovision Dell hardware with new software as their priorities change. That’s kind of a big deal in the AI era, where things are seemingly changing dramatically every few months.
As analysts noted, the idea of an open, disaggregated offering in tech and telecom isn’t new per say. But bringing that familiar concept into the private cloud realm? Well, now you’re on to something.
“It’s not flashy. It’s not disruptive. But maybe that’s the point,” Futurum Group Chief Technology Advisor Keith Townsend wrote on LinkedIn.
“In a year of chaos—from licensing uncertainty to platform fragmentation—Dell’s offering is less a moonshot and more a safety net,” he continued. “Call it boring if you want. Some IT leaders might call it peace of mind.”
AI freedom
But there’s one other element to Dell’s move that makes it interesting: it gives enterprises a way to easily deploy flexible cloud resources for AI without having to go to the public cloud.
“The entire datacenter has become a product in a … and Dell wants to be the one to place that product into the enterprise, leaving space for choices of software and operating systems,” Futuriom’s Craig Matsumoto wrote in research note.
What better way to do that than with a “turnkey” option that enterprises can buy “just as they would purchase an appliance”?
“Even with NVIDIA taking over the AI stack, Dell and its peers have a role to play as the conduit to real-world large enterprises,” he concluded. “That's especially true for the enterprises that want AI deployments outside the cloud.”