Dell Touts Disaggregated Infrastructure To Return Value As Partners Seek VMware Relief For Customers

‘It has been at the forefront with customers over the last four months. We have had numerous customers move away from HCI to take advantage of the savings. With Broadcom’s licensing model many customers are shifting from HCI back to 3-2-1 stacks to save on licensing,’ Todd Johnson, president of Dell Platinum partner Avalon Technologies, tells CRN

Dell’s recently unwrapped storage products and servers are arriving just as customers who have relied on VMware want new ways to design their IT infrastructure to manage costs and return value after changes to pricing have sent bills higher, solution providers told CRN.

“It has been at the forefront with customers over the last four months. We have had numerous customers move away from HCI to take advantage of the savings. With Broadcom’s licensing model, many customers are shifting from HCI back to 3-2-1 stacks to save on licensing,” Todd Johnson (above), president of Dell Platinum partner Avalon Technologies, told CRN via email. “It eliminates the need for the additional vSan costs. PowerStore has been a great fit for customers looking to move and the updates will make it more advantageous.”

CRN reached out to Broadcom VMware for comment, but had not heard back at press time.

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Technologies this month introduced updates to a number of its storage and server lineup including Dell Powerstore and ObjectScale, PowerScale, and PowerProtect, as well as introducing new PowerEdge R470, R570, R670 and R770 servers running Intel Xeon 6 Processors, with P-cores that come in 1U and 2U form factors.

Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of ISG and telecom marketing at Dell Technologies, said with some of the advances to storage and servers, Dell’s reseller and system integrator partners can now offer customers a new way to think about designing IT infrastructure so that it can manage modern applications as well as the latest class of AI workloads.

“There’s a huge opportunity for partners to be able to add value, add services on top of this,” he said. “This really requires an end-to-end approach in terms of thinking about strategy, all the way through an actual deployment.”

Chhabra said traditional three-tier infrastructure models could have a different vendor for compute, networking, and storage, making them complex and difficult to manage, while hyperconverged systems that bundle all three can tie customers into a single vendor, which Dell customers want to avoid.

“This brings us to disaggregated infrastructure, which we believe is the new paradigm for how organizations are thinking about their traditional and modern workloads,” Chhabra said. “In this new evolution, disaggregated infrastructure really offers shared resource pools for compute, storage, and networking that can be applied to whatever workload organizations are looking to run.”

He said many are choosing to use a disaggregated infrastructure model that combines the flexibility of three-tier architecture, and the simplicity of HCI together.

Drew Schulke, Dell’s vice president of product management, primary storage, said one advantage of disaggregated models designed using Dell’s storage is that it gives VMware customers a better value for their virtualization investment thanks to “orders of magnitude higher level of utilization.”

“You want a very high level of utilization on those cores, and we’ve consistently seen in that disaggregated model orders of magnitude higher level of utilization,” he told CRN during the product briefing. “And that’s becoming incredibly important in those VMware environments, based upon how the licensing schemes work, so they’re getting the best TCO possible.”

Additionally, Transparent Snapshots for VMware is a security feature that no other vendor offers said David Noy, Dell’s vice president of product management, data protection.

“This approach allows you to back up your VMware infrastructure with nearly zero impact to running VMs,” he told CRN during the pre-briefing. “What it does is it basically uses a very, very lightweight mechanism for determining what’s changed between each backup, and then it can, in high speed, with no actual impact to the performance of running virtual machines back up those VMs into the PowerProtect Data Domain product.”

Thanks to that snapshot functionality and improvements to PowerProtect, Noy said systems can restore much more quickly in the event of downtime. PowerProtect Data Manager scans for encryption changes, compression and deduplication, and also scans VMware configuration to “look for drift.”

“If an attacker went through and disabled within their VMware infrastructure configuration information that would actually turn off security features for that virtual machine,” Noy told CRN during the briefing. “We would notice that, and we would flag it. We also look at within the virtual machine itself. We actually index the content. And if we see things like content changing, that shouldn’t be changing within a virtual machine, we can flag that as well.”

Gary McConnell, CEO of Dell Platinum partner VirtuIT, a member of the 2025 CRN MSP 500, said with rising costs in the data center, solution providers are looking for value inside every upgrade. The advances in Dell’s latest generation of storage products deliver that.

“One thing we’ve seen over the last 18 months is the costs of power continually increase in the data centers, so any time we can get more efficient and consolidate the architectural footprint, that’s a good thing,” he told CRN via email. “That’s certainly the case with ObjectScale moving to all-flash. This becomes more critical as we continue to see more and more customers adopt AI and utilize AI workloads.”

Johnson said the added compute and memory that the devices can now bring to customers saves rack space in colocations and inside private data centers. He said for organizations that need to save on cloud storage, he relies on ObjectScale.

“ObjectScale is perfect for any customer looking for low-cost cloud storage, which is pretty much every industry,” he told CRN. “Then add-in industries focusing on big data analytics, IoT storage, media distribution, or AI and that is what it is built for. I see the ECS updates having even better options focusing on AI and ML which is top of mind for any business looking to lead or adapt to the current market competition.”