Providing a one stop solution for small/ mid-size data centers and enterprise departmental environments, EMC Corporation and VMware have released the new VCE VxRail Appliance family; the only integrated and jointly engineered hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) in the market for VMware environments. It brings together EMC’s rich data services and leading systems management capabilities with VMware’s leading hyper-converged software that includes VMware vSphere, vCenter Server and Virtual SAN – all in a single product family with one point of support. Hybrid storage VxRail Appliances will extend and simplify VMware customer environments and deliver key performance and capacity advantages in a simple, ready to operate and easily scalable HCIA.
The new appliances extend the hallmark benefits of VCE converged infrastructure – increased agility, simplified operations and lower risk to small businesses, medium-sized enterprises, and department or regional offices for virtualization and end-user computing use. It offers a perfect solution for IT organizations tasked with supporting growing business demands for new applications and services with limited budgets and resources. With the new HC appliances, such organizations do not need to waste their time evaluating and integrating hardware, software, and networking solutions; or learning new operational tools and processes.
From the partner’s perspective, this is a very good alternative at the HCI space, which they otherwise were seeing in Simplivity and Nutanix, etc.
The appliances tightly integrate virtualization, computation, data protection and storage in one system offering organizations the option to start with a couple of virtual machines (VMs), and easily and non-disruptively scale to thousands of VMs with a predictable, “pay-as-you-grow” approach. Available in a broad set of configurations and scale points, the appliance familycovers all business needs ranging from entry systems for small and medium businesses and remote offices to options for performance intensive workloads having more than 76 TB of flash – which is over 2X more flash than any other hyper-converged appliance.
Also integrated with the HCIA are EMC mission-critical data services which include RecoverPoint for automated disaster recovery for critical workloads; virtual SAN offering active stretch clusters providing site level zero data loss protection and integrated vSphere Data Protection for backup and recovery using existing tools. VxRail Appliances leverage EMC cloud tiering to seamlessly extend to more than 20 public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and very shortly Virtustream, providing an additional 10TB of on-demand cloud storage per appliance.
IT organizations can focus more on innovation by creating an automated, dynamic infrastructure that adapts to their business demands as the appliance uniquely simplifies the infrastructure lifecycles with its enhancements for leading efficiency in data reduction technologies like deduplication, compression and erasure coding.
The appliances seamlessly integrate with the broader vSphere ecosystem, fully supporting existing management, automation, monitoring, and availability tools;thus simplifying IT operations, while enabling lower costs. They also integrate with VMware’s cloud management platform and end-user computing solutions.
As IT organizations standardize on converged infrastructure as the foundation for their next generation data centers, EMC is extending its leading converged infrastructure to smaller business and the enterprise edge. EMC’s broad converged infrastructure portfolio helps customers deliver world-class cloud and mobile ready IT services to their business, and can natively replicate between core data center infrastructure for seamless, consistent operations.
“The new VCE VxRail Appliance family, powered by VMware’s hyper-converged software, will help Indian IT organizations with a solution that is easy to use and help them drive innovation for the business. Our joint engineering efforts with EMC, allow us to bring innovations in the software stack and appliances to our customers and offer the best HCI experience,” said BS Nagarajan, Senior Director, Systems Engineering, VMware India.
According to ESG’s research on hybrid cloud trends, 70% of IT respondents plan to invest in HCI over the next 24 months. Moreover, 85% of these same respondents indicated that they plan on leveraging their existing investments in private cloud software to serve as the foundation for their hybrid cloud environment.
“The VxRail Appliance completes our broad portfolio of Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack Systems to provide customers with a converged infrastructure that meets nearly every workload from the edge to the core regardless of size,” said Rajesh Ramnani, Regional Director at VCE.
