Introducing the Dell Jumpstart Solution for Microsoft® Azure

Robert Frost, one of America’s most beloved and honored poets, is often quoted for his early work, “The Road Not Taken.” In it, the author stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn, equally covered in leaves. Which to take? It’s an archetypal dilemma, and one that IT leaders face today regarding Cloud computing.

Ignoring for a moment the advice of other pundits—such as Yogi Berra’s more-humorous “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”—we recommend a diligent approach based on a proven formula: Microsoft’s Azure Cloud computing platform plus Dell’s Jumpstart Solution for Azure.

But don’t take our word for it. In support of the prescriptions that follow, we highlight market response to the Azure platform, along with case studies of implementation success. And we outline the most important ingredients in a hybrid cloud approach, whether you take to the leaf-strewn road with our solution or not

“The middle

of the road is

where the white

line is – and

that’s the worst

place to drive”

— Robert Frost

Four-time Pulitzer Prize

winning American poet

Choosing a Road to Hybrid Cloud

2 Choosing a Road to Hybrid Cloud | Dell Inc., 2015

Hall Talk

Ever hear this in the halls or conference rooms at your organization?

We need to:

• Extend our applications to the cloud with less complexity and integrate with our on-premise infrastructure

• Create development and test environments quickly, and on an as-needed basis

• Orchestrate protection and recovery of our applications with a simplified disaster recovery process across sites

• Quickly backup and recover data without storage restrictions and with minimal complexity across regions

• Know the op-ex versus cap-ex tradeoffs and benefits of all the cloud choices.

You are not alone. Technology for extending data center workloads to the cloud continues to mature and offer significant value and flexibility. But which path to the cloud is the right one for you and your business requirements? How many thousands of IT leaders are asking themselves that very question right now?

At the heart of the conundrum is knowing which workloads to move to the cloud, and how to bridge between your data center and the cloud you choose. The answer is almost always mixed. That’s precisely why Dell and Microsoft often recommend hybrid cloud solutions and a use-case demonstration approach to planning and implementation.

InfoWorld, Jan 27, 2013

65%of enterprise IT orgs will commit to deploying a hybrid cloud by 20161

35%will not

Why Hybrid, Why Azure

Last month, in the Learnings article Don’t Let Cloud Computing Rain on Your Parade, we outlined the as-a-service decisions you should make as a prerequisite for choosing a cloud path. And we defined hybrid cloud as taking “elements of the public and private cloud models and providing an integration point between both, allowing the flexibility of being able to use on-premise resources as well as public cloud resources.”

Even as far back as 2011, InfoWorld was singing the praises of hybrid cloud. Their reasoning, almost prophetic now, was this:

• “Take the case of business intelligence in the cloud — although some people promote the migration of gigabytes of operational data to the cloud, many others find the hybrid approach of keeping the data local and the analytical processing in the cloud to be much more practical.

• “Using a hybrid model is a valuable approach to architecture, considering you can mix and match the resources between local infrastructure, which is typically a sunk cost but difficult to scale, with infrastructure that’s scalable and provisioned on demand.

• “Considering compliance issues, performance requirements, and security restrictions, the need for local is a fact of life. This experience with the hybrid model helps us all get better at understanding what compute cycles and data have to be kept local and what can be processed remotely.”

And that’s just the tip of the benefit iceberg.

You’ll find flexibility, control, security, compliance, and dozens of more positives in the hybrid cloud model. But why choose Microsoft’s Azure hybrid in particular?

3 Choosing a Road to Hybrid Cloud | Dell Inc., 2015

Again, we look to objective researchers, bloggers, authors, and pundits for answers. Citing seamless vendor-agnosticism, corporate popularity, rapid access time, and portability of virtualized workloads, Brian Wu of Seeking Alpha observed, “Azure is perfectly poised to soon become the most dominant cloud player.”

Blogger Jeremy Foster drew an interesting analogy: “AWS [Amazon Web Services] is like a fleet of delivery trucks. You hire them for the space and the engines that deliver your goods. Azure is a fleet of trucks with customized features - trucks with refrigerator units, trucks with tankers specially sanitized for carrying potable milk, trucks with concrete mixers, and trucks that meet Defense Department’s security standards.”

There are the how-to-replace-aging- legacy-hardware-and-software-angles such as this from Stuart Robertson of SWI: “With its vending-machine-like capabilities, Azure is swiftly addressing the needs of those who have aging infrastructure by providing a set of services that can be consumed at will, at an affordable cost.”

Then there’s Forbes contributor Ben Kepes: “For those enterprises that have an existing relationship with Microsoft, and significant investments across the Microsoft development stack, Azure may well be the more natural fit…”

And Barron’s: “We believe that Azure is in the best position for hybrid deployments for a number of reasons. First, most existing applications are written on Windows, which is a major advantage. More importantly, enterprises are comfortable buying from Microsoft, and the company is investing heavily in building out more functionality. A core part of Microsoft’s cloud strategy is to enable customers to easily move workloads among on-premise, public and private cloud environments. Many other competitors require most applications to be rewritten; as a result, competitors are selected in situations where only new workloads will be moved to the cloud.”

It’s not a slam-dunk. Microsoft Azure is not leading the market—not yet—but as you can see most experts believe it won’t be long. As the Barron’s writer noted, most shops have Windows on premise and Azure is Windows—it’s not hard to see why customers will be comfortable moving workloads to Azure.

“We believe that Azure is in the best position for hybrid deployments for a number of reasons.” -Barron’s

Jump-starting Your Azure Implementation

So let’s just say that you have decided to adopt a hybrid approach to cloud using Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. The next step is the Dell Use-Case Demonstration. This is where we get back to solving the conundrum of which workloads to move to the cloud and how to bridge to your data center.

Together, we will validate how Microsoft Azure will meet your business needs and help you plan next steps. Dell will collaborate with you to conduct a proof of concept (PoC) with non-production workloads and provide a hands-on knowledge transfer for any one of the following use cases: backup and recovery, development and testing environments, disaster recovery, or extending resources to the cloud. The process workflow is illustrated in the graphic below.

4 Choosing a Road to Hybrid Cloud | Dell Inc., 2015

4

Together, we will validate how Microsoft Azure will meet your business needs and help you plan next steps. Dell will collaborate with you to conduct a proof of concept (PoC) with non-production workloads and provide a hands-on knowledge transfer for any one of the following use cases: backup and recovery, development and testing environments, disaster recovery, or extending resources to the cloud. The process workflow is illustrated in the graphic below.

Build a Bridge To address additional hardware and software considerations, Dell believes the best cloud strategy should help do three things:

Empower users and customers with the right service levels for each application and user Optimize, streamline, simplify, and automate application delivery and IT operations Enable service-centric IT that accelerates business responsiveness now and into the future

Dell Use-Case Demonstration

5 Choosing a Road to Hybrid Cloud | Dell Inc., 2015

CPS on Dell is optimized in every way, leveraging energy-efficient, open standards-based hardware as well as software-defined techniques to deliver the best price and environmentally friendly performance possible: from hyperscale-inspired Dell PowerEdge servers to high-density Dell Storage solutions and from low-latency networking switches to Dell’s popular systems management platforms, OpenManage and Active Fabric Manager.

The bonus is that behind Microsoft’s seamless CPS support sits Dell’s award-winning hardware support. The ProSupport Plus features are too many to list here but the highlights include: priority access to ProSupport Engineers 24x7 and proactive automated support with SupportAssist. Combined, these features have resulted in a 58% reduction in steps to resolve support issues.

It’s one thing to have all of your new hardware and software fully installed, integrated, and ready to enable your business, but what about your IT team? Are they ready to exploit all the new features and benefits? Dell is a full-service training provider for IT professionals with advanced Azure courses such as Introduction to Azure for Developers, Developing Windows Azure and Web Services, and Microsoft Azure for IT Professionals.

All of this purchased through one procurement process and a single source for deployment and support makes the adoption of an Azure-based hybrid cloud that much easier. And it makes the time to value that much faster.

With those goals in mind, and in partnership with Microsoft, we’ve developed the Cloud Platform System (CPS) powered by Dell. With CPS powered by Dell, you get Microsoft’s proven software stack and Dell’s cloud-proven hardware and management software, strategically integrated and validated, in a pre-configured appliance. It is a scalable solution, ready-to-run, and highly available for any amount of demand. Best of all, CPS powered by Dell gives you the ability to quickly deploy your cloud with the speed, ease, assurance, and efficiency of a Dell appliance.

5

With those goals in mind, and in partnership with Microsoft, we’ve developed the Cloud Platform System (CPS) powered by Dell. With CPS powered by Dell, you get Microsoft’s proven software stack and Dell’s cloud-proven hardware and management software, strategically integrated and validated, in a pre-configured appliance. It is a scalable solution, ready-to-run, and highly available for any amount of demand. Best of all, CPS powered by Dell gives you the ability to quickly deploy your cloud with the speed, ease, assurance, and efficiency of a Dell appliance.

CPS on Dell is optimized in every way, leveraging energy-efficient, open standards-based hardware as well as software-defined techniques to deliver the best price and environmentally friendly performance possible: from hyperscale-inspired Dell PowerEdge servers to high-density Dell Storage solutions and from low-latency networking switches to Dell’s popular systems management platforms, OpenManage and Active Fabric Manager.

The bonus is that behind Microsoft’s seamless CPS support sits Dell’s award-winning hardware support. The ProSupport Plus features are too many to list here but the highlights include: priority access to ProSupport Engineers 24x7 and proactive automated support with SupportAssist. Combined, these features have resulted in a 58% reduction in steps to resolve support issues. 8

It’s one thing to have all of your new hardware and software fully installed, integrated, and ready to enable your business, but what about your IT team? Are they ready to exploit all the new features and benefits? Dell is a full-service training provider for IT professionals with advanced Azure courses such as Introduction to Azure for Developers, Developing Windows Azure and Web Services, and Microsoft Azure for IT Professionals.

All of this purchased through one procurement process and a single source for deployment and support makes the adoption of an Azure-based hybrid cloud that much easier. And it makes the time to value that much faster.

And if you’re Easing into the Water … Vapor The CPS option is certainly a sound choice if you are a large organization that needs thousands of virtual machines (VMs) for the workloads you move to cloud, but what about smaller organizations? How do they ease into the hybrid cloud world as their business grows?

We have you covered.

Build a Bridge

To address additional hardware and software considerations, Dell believes the best cloud strategy should help do three things:

• Empower users and customers with the right service levels for each application and user

• Optimize, streamline, simplify, and automate application delivery and IT operations

• Enable service-centric IT that accelerates business responsiveness now and into the future

8

18 19

Steps to resolve

ProSupport Plus

58% reduction

5

34 33

Minutes on the phone

ProSupport Plus

Lenovo Unlimited Premium Support

84% reduction

Lenovo Unlimited Premium Support

HP Care Pack, NBD + AD

HP Care Pack, NBD + AD

58% reduction

84% reduction

Source: Third-party lab testing with Principled Technologies Tech Support process compared against HP & Lenovo), Oct 2014

6 Choosing a Road to Hybrid Cloud | Dell Inc., 2015

And if you’re Easing into the Water … Vapor

The CPS option is certainly a sound choice if you are a large organization that needs thousands of virtual machines (VMs) for the workloads you move to cloud, but what about smaller organizations? How do they ease into the hybrid cloud world as their business grows?

We have you covered!

For 25-150 VMs, Dell and our approved partners will help you decide which workloads to move, we can assist with development and testing, and we will provide on-premise capability through our “Cloud in a box” VRTX appliances. For larger VM requirements but not in the thousands, Dell offers Reference Architectures through Microsoft’s Private Cloud Fast Track program for the on premise installations that are designed to be able to leverage Azure.

When They Did It

Once upon a time there were three companies that needed help with their cloud solutions.

1. NTTX Select, a hosting service provider that offers customized, managed IT solutions for businesses and organizations of all sizes, had pioneered Microsoft cloud services in the UK hosting market with great success. But they wanted even greater efficiencies in building cloud solutions for their customers. Building a cloud infrastructure was a lot of work and took precious time.

Microsoft CPS powered by Dell was the answer.

By building on CPS, NTTX was able to get Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings to market in days instead of months, expand into lucrative new markets, better scale and protect workloads, and focus its staff on new services rather than infrastructure configuration an3wd coordination. Philip Moss, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of NTTX said this, “Our customers can move applications between their on-premises infrastructures, NTTX datacenters, and Microsoft Azure datacenters to gain the best performance, scalability, and cost structure.”

2. Equifax maintains credit data on millions of consumers and businesses worldwide. Organizations large and small rely on Equifax for consumer and business insights, portfolio management, fraud detection, decision-making technology, marketing tools, and much more. It also empowers individual consumers to manage their personal credit information and protect their identities.

To keep growing, Equifax needed standardized platforms to deliver information solutions in all markets. They chose Microsoft CPS powered by Dell to set up these services in months versus years. CPS will facilitate new business growth and free Equifax IT staff to spend more time on innovation. Brandon Holcomb, Vice President of Global Platform Services at Equifax put it this way, “It gives us a standardized way to deliver a lot of processing power, running on industry-standard hardware, into any location.”

1Why the hybrid cloud model is the best approach, David Linthicum, InfoWorld, Jan 27, 20112Why Azure Has A Great Future Ahead, Brian Wu, Seeking Alpha, January 20, 20153Why Azure is Running the Sochi Olympics and Not AWS, Jeremy Foster, Feb 14, 20144Why Azure is a Game-Changer for Microsoft, SWI, by Stuart Robertson, December 2, 20145Gartner Shines A Light On The Amazon Versus Microsoft Cloud Race, by Ben Kepes, January 1, 20156Microsoft Could Stick It to Amazon Web Services, Barron’s, Hot Research, April 27, 20157IDC Reveals Cloud Predictions for 2015, https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25350114

Dell and the Dell logo are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. © 2015 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and other countries. June 2015 | Choosing-a-Road-to-Hybrid-Cloud | Rev 1.0

3. Capgemini specializes in helping large firms—as well as midsize firms and startups—transform their businesses. Present in more than 40 countries with almost 140,000 employees, Capgemini provides an array of consultative services that combine cutting-edge technology with deep industry expertise.

Many Capgemini customers are eager to embrace cloud computing but are challenged by legal regulations and data security concerns. Capgemini chose Microsoft CPS powered by Dell to give customers a way to quickly deploy private clouds and gain an easy path to the Microsoft Azure public cloud for a hybrid solution. Customers can get into the cloud in weeks instead of months while meeting regulatory requirements.

“We love the idea of a converged system, because we have one vendor to call for computing, networking, storage, and software support, all hidden behind a single license,” said Keith Kelly, Enterprise and Cloud Architect in the Infrastructure Services group at Capgemini. “We also like the fact that CPS is not specialized for certain workloads but is a generic platform that can stretch in different directions to perform database analysis one minute and handle email traffic the next.”

Summing Up

Here’s our prescription in a nutshell:

A. Consider the flexibility, control, security, compliance, and dozens of more positives in the hybrid cloud model

B. Take advantage of seamless vendor-agnosticism, corporate popularity, rapid access time, and the portability of virtualized workloads by utilizing the Swiss-army-knife of cloud systems, Microsoft Azure

C. Solve for which workloads to move to the cloud by using the Dell Use-Case Demonstration approach

D. Complete your hybrid cloud adoption in weeks versus months

E. Enjoy some of the most advanced IT lifecycle support on the planet

F. Celebrate the successful birth of your hybrid cloud solution by throwing a big party for your IT team and have a Pulitzer prize-winning poet write a poem to honor the occasion.

There is a legend about Robert Frost that bears sharing. It is said that for President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the then 86-year-old Frost struggled to write a poem that he felt was befitting the event. Eight inches of snow had fallen, the temperature was in the 20s, and the wind was blowing at near 20 mph, making it feel even colder.

As Frost approached the lectern, sure that his latest work was inferior, he loosened his grip on the pages, releasing the new poem to the wind. Then, from memory, he recited a poem he had written much earlier in his career, a patriotic reminiscence entitled, “The Gift Outright.”

The poet had considered his options and chosen a road, this time a proven road that he knew would most closely match the requirements of his host and his audience.

Sound familiar?

Next Steps

For a complimentary workshop to assess your cloud requirements and readiness, and provide tailored implementation proposals, roadmaps, and financial justifications, please contact your Dell sales representative or visit www.dell.com/ITconsulting.