The cloud arm of Dell Technologies, Virtustream, is now live in Australia with the company partnering with Macquarie Telecom to enter a red hot market.
Virtustream global COO Simon Walsh told The Australian that the market has been on the company’s radar for some time but entry had to wait until the $US58 billion tie-up between Dell and its erstwhile owner EMC had been fully bedded down.
“We always intended to get to the Asia Pacific market with Japan and Australia the two areas of focus and we will be ready for customer availability in Australia in May,” Mr Walsh said.
“In the last two day we ran two separate CIO roundtables in Sydney and Melbourne and I have to say the conversations have been very illuminating, there’s a genuine cloud adoption mindset.”
“Regulated industries are using cloud as much a non-regulated one but the level of adoption is quite varied and it’s not about cost it’s about speed,” he added.
With AWS, Microsoft’s Azure already active players in the market Mr Walsh said that there was one feature set Virtustream apart from its peers. The company has always pitted itself against the competition as a mission-critical services provider.
According to Mr Walsh, Virtustream offers a service level against performance and availability of applications running on legacy systems, as well as giving them the sort of freedom typically enjoyed by cloud native applications.
“We have engineered an answer for high I/O intensive applications where the database is historically welded to the hardware, that means the infrastructure has to provide the resilience and the hardware also has physical restrictions.”
Virtustream’s pricing model not only follows the pay as you go paradigm — where customers pay for actual capacity consumed — but Mr Walsh said it’s also about creating an additional layer of accountability and making life simple for organisation hoping to keep on foot in the on-premises world.
“You can’t get a SLA against high availability and performance on AWS and because this is something they leave to the system integrators or to the customers,” he said.
Virtustream may be labelled as the public cloud arm of Dell but is perhaps best described as a hybrid operator with attributes of the public cloud — with multi-tenancy and a consumption-based billing model. But it also provides the certainty around security, the granular visibility of application operations, and data sovereignty that’s associated with the private cloud.
Mr Walsh added that the company picked Macquarie Telecom given the need for partners that could help deliver on Virtustream’s promise of reliability for mission critical applications.
“We chose Macquarie because they had the correct geographical split — Sydney and Canberra, they have good network services in the government space and have the capabilities to provide certainty on service levels,” he said.
“I have huge respect for AWS, Azure and Google but their value proposition is lot of next generation digital solution but 60-70 per cent of IT budgets are still about keeping the lights on legacy systems, we look to bring those costs down.”
Macquarie Cloud Services group executive James Mystakidis said the Virtustream partnership is an endorsement of the work done by the telco to provide the highest quality of infrastructure and services
“We are delighted to provide local infrastructure for the Dell cloud to be delivered in country, across multiple availability zones.” Mr Mystakidis said.
“We are very pleased to have our Australian owned and operated data centres now front and centre with these international investments.”
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