Dell EMC eliminates barriers to HCI adoption

Dell EMC announces it is eliminating barriers to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) adoption with several updates to its HCI portfolio, including Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, VxRack Systems and XC Series, and new flexible consumption models aimed at making IT even simpler to acquire, deploy and manage.

“HCI is the fastest-growing part of the IT infrastructure market because customers want radical infrastructure simplification, and Dell EMC is the fastestgrowing vendor in this segment with the strongest HCI portfolio, bar none,” said Chad Sakac, president, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, Dell EMC. “We’re making the move to HCI even easier for customers with innovative payment solutions that eliminate the burden of upfront costs and longterm commitments, backed by HCI’s ability to easily scale up and down.”

According to IDC, the worldwide hyper-converged system market continued its trajectory as the fastest growing subset of the broader converged infrastructure market in 2016, surpassing US $2.2 billion in global revenue, a substantial increase of 110 percent compared to 2015. Dell Technologies was the fastest growing hyper-converged system market vendor, growing revenue 206 percent in 4Q 2016 year over year, based on the success of Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, VxRack Systems and the XC Series.1

Enhanced Dell EMC HCI Portfolio

The Dell EMC VxRail Appliance family is the industry’s only HCI appliances powered by VMware vSAN and jointly engineered with VMware. According to analyst firm IDC, sequential revenue growth from VxRail Appliances was four times higher than the entire HCI market during the fourth quarter of 2016, demonstrating more than 70 percent quarter over quarter growth.1In response to VxRail Appliances being deployed increasingly for core data center applications, Dell EMC VxRail Appliances 4.5 delivers several new enterprise features available on Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers in the coming months.

Enhanced enterprise deployment features-Streamlined installation and implementation experience designed to help enterprise customers manage VxRail Appliances at scale. The VxRail Appliance deployment experience, which is optimized to deploy a single appliance in only 20 minutes3, now can be applied to larger cluster sizes, allowing customers to add and manage 10or more appliances as easily as a single appliance.

Additional hardware flexibility lowers total cost of ownership - New single processor options, priced as low as US $25,000 for a three-node cluster, 4 reduce the cost of deploying processor-based licensed software for scaling up to 64 nodes. New network options, including up to 12 additional ports, allow VxRail Appliances to be deployed in environments requiring physical network segmentation of workloads.

Support for the latest VMware technologies - New VMware vSphere 6.5 and VMware vSAN 6.6 support adds optimized data service algorithms to accelerate flash performance, software-defined data-at-rest encryption to protect against unwanted access to data, and enhanced protection for stretched clusters.

Improved interoperability with Dell EMC technologies - Customers deploying VxRail Appliances now can leverage a centralized Dell EMC Secure Remote Services (ESRS) gate way to provide a single point of secure, two-way remote support for their entire Dell EMC infrastructure. The Dell EMC VxRack Systems, the only rack-scale hyper-converged systems with integrated top-of-rack SpineLeaf networking and SDN options, are the perfect choice for customers embracing software-defined technology across the data center and ready for HCI with pre-integrated physical and software-defined networking. Updates to the VxRack portfolio of VxRack FLEX powered by ScaleIO and VxRack SDDC powered by VMware Cloud Foundation include: Support for more data-demanding applications -VxRack FLEX expands configurations with support for Dell EMC PowerEdge R930, enabling the most data-demanding applications such as OLTP, in-memory databases, OLAP, CRM and ERP.

High performance networking architecture for modern data centers - VxRack FLEX now incorporates the next-generation Cisco Nexus 93180YC-EX switches that increase scale, improve performance and natively support softwaredefined networking. Enhanced hardware flexibility - VxRack SDDC now offers six additional PowerEdge R630-based server nodes for both expanded high performance and entry level options in cores, memory and CPUs.

The Dell EMC XC Series hyper-converged appliances combine compute, storage and virtualization resources in turnkey, 1U and 2U appliances configured to-order. XC Series appliances are best suited for customers requiring hypervisor choice, which may include Microsoft Hyper-V, and support a variety of specific use cases, ranging from typical enterprise business applications to VDI environments.

Updates to the portfolio include:

Dell EMC XC430 Xpress - This new appliance offers small to midsized companies a complete, all-in-one infrastructure solution with robust three-node configurations starting as low as US $25,000.5 Optimized for the smallest environments up to four nodes, the XC430 Xpress consolidates servers and storage in as small as 3U of rack space to drastically simplify on-site infrastructure.

Dell EMC XC Series with Dell EMC Data Protection -Dell EMC Avamar Virtual Edition, Data Domain and Data Domain Virtual Edition with XC Series offer efficient, enterprise-level data protection and simplified backup and disaster recovery, offering capabilities not previously available with the XC Series. Dell EMC XC Series with Pivotal Cloud Foundry - To rapidly develop and deploy applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, XC Series and Pivotal engineering teams have collaborated to create the ideal configuration and deployment guide, which reduces risk and accelerates a customer’s ability to increase developer productivity and reduce IT operation costs.