Dell Intros All-In-One PowerOne Data Center Automation Solution

Dell Technologies on Tuesday announced Dell EMC PowerOne, an autonomous infrastructure solution it said would automate management and maintenance of Dell EMC hardware in data centers.

The forthcoming technology will be available through Dell’s pay-as-you-go data center-as-a-service offering, which allows customers to use Dell hardware on-premises through a cloud-like subscription model.

PowerOne, which features a built-in automation engine, is an all-in-one system that integrates Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, PowerMax storage, PowerSwitch networking, PowerProtect data protection, and VMware virtualization software.

The technology automates certain tasks and serves as a stepping stone to the vision of a fully autonomous data center, where a data center can monitor and manage itself automatically with little human intervention, said Jon Siegal, Dell’s VP of product marketing, in a recent press briefing.

“IT is on a journey toward autonomous. IT is not ready to go completely hands-free 24/7, but with PowerOne, they can start to declare outcomes and rely on the system to handle the rest,” he said. For example, with PowerOne, users can create a workload-ready VMware cluster with just a few clicks, and the system will automatically provision compute resources and create storage volumes, he said.

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Dell executives say PowerOne is part of the company’s overarching strategy to simplify IT operations and provide enterprises the ability to easily consume on-premises infrastructure through an OpEx model for IT infrastructure purchasing. Analysts say all legacy hardware vendors including Hewlett Packard Enterprise are embracing the as-a-service model because customers are demanding it.

“Everyone is doing it,” said IDC group VP Ashish Nadkarni, in an interview with DCK. “They are saying, you don’t need to go to the public cloud for a flexible consumption model, we can offer it to you on-premise.”

Dell Technologies on Demand

Dell announced PowerOne as part of a larger announcement, in which the company introduced Dell Technologies on Demand, which packages together an existing portfolio of on-premises services, including PC and data center-as-a-service offerings, as well as deployment, support, and management services.

In April, Dell introduced Dell Technologies Cloud, a set of hybrid cloud products that include a data center-as-a-service offering that combines Dell EMC’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure with the VMware Cloud Foundation software stack.

Dell executives on Tuesday said the newly named Dell Technologies on Demand set of offerings now also supports PowerEdge servers and provides a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model by measuring processor usage by the hour.

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The Dell EMC PowerOne autonomous infrastructure product will be available Nov. 22 on Dell Technologies On Demand’s data center-as-a-service offering. The company said its autonomous features include:

IDC Research VP Eric Sheppard said the release of PowerOne is important for Dell because enterprise IT teams want to shift away from repetitive IT tasks, such as managing data center infrastructure, and focus more on enabling new business services.

“They want to automate as much of the management as much as possible with software and eliminate lower-value tasks and drive value in new parts of the organization,” Sheppard said.

Nadkarni said providing automation features is one of the cloud-like features enterprises want. By offering automation for on-premises deployments, Dell could slow down or stem the exodus to the public cloud, he added.