The Dell/VMware relationship remains strong despite split

VMware is in the process of spinning out from Dell Technologies, but the working relationship remains as strong as ever with a bunch of announcements from VMworld.

All told, the pair made four significant announcements at the show, the first being that VMware Cloud will be sold on systems acquired through Dell’s Apex pay-as-you-go program. The new Apex offering gives customers the ability to move workloads across multiple cloud environments and scale resources quickly with predictable pricing and costs.

The new offering combines Dell’s hyperconverged infrastructure VxRail with VMware Cloud, VMware Tanzu for building cloud-native applications, and VMware HCX for application migration. Businesses can deploy the offering in their data center, at an edge location or a colocation facility with partners like Equinix.

Dell is promising organizations it will help them meet local regulatory requirements and help protect them from malicious attacks with built-in cyber resiliency. Dell says the initial deployment can be up and running in as few as 14 days.

The second announcement could be considered part of the previous announcement, depending on how you look at it. Dell’s Apex Cloud Services with VMware Cloud now support VMware Tanzu, the company’s containers and Kubernetes offering.

The VMware Tanzu integration enables building, testing, and running cloud-native applications alongside traditional applications. It also supports migrating workloads across multiple clouds with VMware HCX without having to rearchitect applications for different cloud environments.

Third is the launch of Dell EMC ObjectScale software with Tanzu. ObjectScale allows organizations to run Amazon S3-compatible object storage alongside virtual machines. This gives developers a self-service storage instance in a private cloud that they can then deploy in a public cloud.

ObjectScale brings Kubernetes-native, software-defined object storage to vSphere with Tanzu and the vSAN Data Persistence Platform. ObjectScale also extends the reach of Dell EMC VxRail to workloads such as AI, analytics, and cloud-native applications that require S3.

Finally, Dell announced a reference design for the development of AI-based applications to run on Nvidia GPUs. The design was jointly developed by VMware and Nvidia. The reference design uses the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite running on Nvidia-certified hardware, which includes VxRail, PowerScale and PowerSwitch servers. Dell says the designs can speed development by as much as 20%.