Dell EMC: VxRail Appliances and VxRack System 1000 Powered by PowerEdge Servers

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, expanded its converged systems portfolio by integrating its PowerEdge servers into VxRail appliances and VxRack System 1000 hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) to address new use cases.

VxRack System 1000

By owning both the compute and storage layers of the hyper-converged stack and having a co-engineering relationship with Vmware, Inc., the company can deliver more customer value by innovating faster. Firm’s supply chain provides flexibility and speed of delivery and can offer new price points that allow more customers to enjoy HCI. Now customers can partner with a single vendor for end-to-end HCI with service and support offerings that provide a path to assisting business growth and investment protection to modernize their data center.

“Dell EMC owning both the compute and storage portions of the hyper-converged stack is a game-changer for the HCI portfolio,” said Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “It allows the company to deliver more value choices for customers via investment protection, faster innovation, supply chain advantages and savings it can pass on. The fast integration of PowerEdge servers into VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems is a major example of the synergy of the acquisition and the benefits of the companies coming together – more value, more choice and maintained investment protection for customers.“

VxRail appliances

VxRail appliances based on PowerEdge servers
The VxRail appliance family, HCI appliances developed and optimized for VMware environments, have configurations powered by the Intel Broadwell platforms, vSphere and VMware VSAN technologies and based on PowerEdge servers. These feature 40% more CPU performance for the same price, increased flexibility and scalability with more configurations, all-flash nodes equipped with 2x more storage and a three-node entry point that is 25% less expensive.

Addressable workloads include:

PowerEdge R730xd

• Storage heavy workloads including big data analytics and exchange can take advantage of VxRail appliances based on the PowerEdge R730xd platform that has dense storage nodes coupled with the latest Intel Corp. processors to provide high-performance processing.

• Graphics-heavy client virtualization workloads that require increasing levels of performance found in the latest OSs including Windows 10, as well as productivity applications and graphics-intensive CAD/CAM, R&D applications. Everyone from knowledge workers and mobile professionals to designers and engineers will benefit from VxRail with the PowerEdge R730 platform including GPU acceleration from NVIDIA Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), with dual configurations of the NVIDIA Tesla M60 with NVIDIA Grid software.

• ROBO environments can leverage the low-end three-node entry option across the family with a starting price of under $45,000 allowing customers to cost-effectively deploy hyper-converged infrastructure to simplify IT management at multiple remote sites.

For customers seeking to accelerate time-to-value of an enterprise client virtualization solution, the company will offer configurations of VxRail Appliances with VMware Horizon. The solutions are optimized for client virtualization in order to provide simplified deployment and management of virtual workspaces. The solution, validated by the firm with support from VMware and NVIDIA, offers flexibility and performance to accommodate a variety of needs and decreases time-to-delivery of the solution from weeks to days.

VxRack system based on PowerEdge servers
VxRack System 1000, a rack-scale hyper-converged system with integrated top-of-rack Spine-Leaf networking and SDN options, is a choice for core data centers that require both enterprise-grade resiliency and the ability to start small and scale easily. Now based on PowerEdge R630 and R730xd servers, these VxRack Systems offer more capacity and 40% more CPU performance without increasing footprint or cost. With more than twenty configurations, customers have the flexibility to add as needed compute-heavy, storage-heavy or balanced configurations (in both all-flash and hybrid models) as needed to match their workload requirements.

Benefits of VxRack System all-flash configurations include:

• All-flash economics that offer 2.5x more usable flash capacity for a similar price versus previous generations

• Application acceleration with SanDisk DAS Cache speeds storage I/O operations while reducing latency, resulting in improved performance of I/O-intensive applications such as SQL OLTP

• Configuration flexibility enables customers to scale linearly as their workloads require by incrementally adding high-density, storage-heavy or compute-heavy node configurations

Regardless of use case or where an organization is on its journey to the cloud, the company offers an expanding portfolio of appliances (VxRail or XC Series), rack-scale engineered systems, validated systems, reference architectures and solutions that are optimized for both traditional and cloud-native workloads running in data center core or edge locations.

Dell Financial Services (DFS) has a range of flexible payment options to support customers wherever they are in their journey to the cloud. Whether a customer is seeking to balance OpEx versus CapEx or determine the right mix of off-premises versus on-premises solutions, DFS has solutions – from traditional leases to the new portfolio of OpenScale flexible consumption solutions – to match the range of consumption use cases of company’s customers.

Availabity:

• VxRack FLEX with PowerEdge-based nodes are orderable and available in Q4 2016.

• VxRack SDDC with PowerEdge-based nodes with integrated PowerEdge servers will be orderable in Q4 2016.

• VxRail appliances integrated with PowerEdge servers are orderable and available in Q4 2016 in most major markets and available worldwide in 2017.

• VxRail appliances based on PowerEdge servers with VMware Horizon for client virtualization is available in December 2016.

Todd Sharp, senior network engineer, Topgolf International, Inc., said: “Topgolf’s ‘Technology Innovation’ team supports the gaming, point-of-sale and kitchen apps at each of our more than 30 Topgolf venues. HA is critical to our revenue generation and great guest experiences. That’s why we feel we can rest easy with the reliability and performance we get with the three-node Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. It will keep us operating no matter what.“

John Fanelli, VP, products, NVIDIA, said: “Within any organization, high-performance users need to be productive and work quickly without compromise. NVIDIA Tesla GPUs with NVIDIA GRID software and the Dell PowerEdge R730 server let people work on demanding, graphics-intensive applications and projects from any location on a variety of devices.“

Yanbing Li, SVP and GM, storage and availability business unit, VMware, Inc., said: “VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems are Dell EMC HCI solutions that speed deployment and simplify management of VMware environments for business critical data center environments across the hybrid cloud. At the core of these innovative Dell EMC HCI solutions is VMware vSAN, an enterprise software defined storage solution that can start small and is embedded in the vSphere Kernel and easily managed through VMware vCenter. For the more than 500,000 customers of Vmware, these new Dell EMC HCI offerings based on PowerEdge servers provide a way to intelligently invest in IT with more compute power, higher storage density, and compelling infrastructure economics.“

Chad Sakac, president, converged platforms and solutions division, Dell EMC, said: “As the clear market leader in converged infrastructure and the HCI domain being the fastest-growing segment driven by customers modernizing their data centers, Dell EMC is maniacally focused on continuing to expand our HCI portfolio to address more uses cases for customers of all sizes. With our industry-leading PowerEdge Servers in VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems, customers gain tremendous functionality and better economics to leverage HCI for workloads whether they live on the edge or the core of the data center.“