Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has been red hot over the past few years as more customers look for turnkey solutions to simplify the deployment of technology in its software defined data centres. The converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC, formerly known as VCE, was a late entrant into the market, but with Usain Bolt-like speed, the company has caught up to the field and is well on its way to becoming the market leader and de facto standard.
The value proposition for Dell EMC is as simple as its products are to deploy. Its HCI solutions, VxRack and VxRail, are kept in lockstep with VMware’s vSphere and VSAN roadmaps. Businesses that want to run VMware on HCI will almost certainly get a superior experience with VxRack and/or VxRail than they will with any other solution. The VMware install base is obviously huge, and Dell EMC has parlayed this into the following momentum in about a year:
- 1,000-plus customers
- 8,000-plus nodes
- 100,000+ cores
- 65-plus PB of storage
- 70-plus countries
It is important to note that it is not just the relationship and common owner with VMware that has made the group successful. Since the inception of VCE, the organisation has been obsessed with making the complex simple. It is first fully engineered product, vBlock, set the standard for turnkey solutions by offering a product with simplified support, packaging and implementation with a sustainable model. It took what it learned with converged systems (vBlock) and extended it to HCI, and VxRack and VxRail were born.
The low-hanging fruit for the HCI products has been the jointly engineered solution with VMware to deliver the VDI solution, Horizon, in preconfigured bundles. Customers can purchase a turnkey solution that can support a specific set of users, such as 50, 100, 200, etc. This lets businesses focus on innovation instead of worrying about how to attach this storage to that server.
Extending VxRail
Dell EMC has now extended its hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, so customers can purchase Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) on VxRail. The extension of VxRail to hybrid cloud is a logical one, since almost every company I talk to has hybrid cloud plans. Cloud mania has primarily focused on public cloud adoption, but the fact is that hybrid clouds will be around a long, long time.
EHC on the VxRail P470 appliances is targeted towards midmarket companies that don’t have the technical staff to stand up its own hybrid cloud. As is the case with all of Dell EMC converged infrastructure products, this will be a full turnkey solution that includes services and is designed to support environments from 200 to 1000 VMs. Companies can start small and then scale out as the demand for hybrid clouds grows. The solution includes all hardware, software and lifecycle services and starts at an aggressive $1.25 million (€1.18 million). There is an all-flash version for mission-critical workloads that has a slightly higher starting price.
The digital era is here, and IT is being tasked with focusing on innovation, which means it does not have the time it used to for racking, stacking and tuning infrastructure. The turnkey EHC on VxRail provides businesses with an easy, fast way to get a hybrid cloud up and running without the associated risk of the do it yourself model.
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