Dell Technologies made a move today that we fully expected and is offering a rack-scale Dell EMC VMware hyper-converged cloud platform. At VMworld in August, we saw the company’s direction. At Dell EMC world we started to see the fruits of the acquisition. With Dell PowerEdge servers running VMware Cloud Foundation the company is offering a rack-scale solution that is ready to get up and running quickly. The company’s vision of building solutions for hybrid clouds largely rests on solutions like VxRack. With the new releases, there are now 12 configurations up from just one previously. Here are the details for some of the new the configurations including the all-flash and hybrid configurations.
Dell EMC VxRack SDDC is a turnkey SDDC hyper-converged solution for VMware. The vision is that one can run traditional workloads or cloud workloads on the infrastructure and be up and running much faster than a typical OpenStack installation.
Here is an excerpt form the Dell Technologies press release:
The launch of VxRail Appliances pioneered a new product development, go-to-market and selling approach, making them one of our company’s fastest growing solutions. Today, VxRail is winning in the hyper-converged appliance space because heritage EMC, VMware and Dell teams, as Dell Technologies, have collaborated closely on a common solution, built on market-leading technologies, to deliver the easiest and fastest way for customers to extend their VMware environments.
Based on customer feedback and adoption, it only makes sense to bring this model to Dell EMC rack scale hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). The leaders in servers, storage and virtual computing have joined together once again to engineer the Dell EMC VxRack System with SDDC. For customers standardized on VMware, the new VxRack SDDC, based on the Dell EMC PowerEdge platform and powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, offers a complete, turnkey software-defined data center that delivers a rack scale hyper-converged solution to simplify the journey to private cloud.
Dell EMC PowerEdge technology expands flexibility and enhances performance of VxRack SDDC
The inclusion of the world’s number one server platform, PowerEdge, into VxRack SDDC is testament to our vision of Dell EMC being stronger and better together. As an enterprise class Software Defined Storage solution, VxRack SDDC requires a highly reliable, high performance and extremely manageable foundation that only Dell PowerEdge servers can provide. In addition, it requires an ability to innovate fast to deliver real customer value and leverage our world-class supply chain to provide quality, flexibility and speed of delivery while offering our customers increased choice with better performance – including higher core counts, increased memory, and high performance all-flash.
Tight VMware integration is the center of gravity
VxRack SDDC, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, is unique in the industry as the only turnkey SDDC hyper-converged solution for VMware engineered to support both traditional and cloud-native workloads running in almost any environment. VMware Cloud Foundation is the most complete and only unified VMware SDDC platform available today. By natively integrating the best of VMware’s industry leading infrastructure software (vSAN, vSphere, and NSX) with VMware SDDC Manager for full lifecycle automation, VMware Cloud Foundation dramatically simplifies deployment and enables a seamless operational experience with VMware SDDC. Within VxRack SDDC, customers have the ability to provision a subset of the infrastructure for multi-tenant isolation and security. And, similar to VxRail Appliances, customers can continue to leverage their known and proven tools within their environment such as vCenter Server and the vRealize Suite.
Complete, turnkey SDDC solution with total lifecycle management and world class support
In addition to integrated software, VxRack SDDC comes as a complete physical infrastructure package including racks, networking, physical asset security and cable management. VxRack SDDC supports as few as 8 nodes and scales linearly up to a maximum configuration of 192 nodes across 8 racks allowing customers to take full advantage of hyper-converged economics to start small and grow as their business demands. VxRack SDDC provides full lifecycle management for the entire solution from Dell EMC including comprehensive service and support offerings for investment protection on the path to modernizing the data center.
Dell EMC’s hyper-converged options
We understand that one size does not fit all for customers. VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC represent different turnkey hyper-converged options to easily deploy and extend VMware environments from their core data center to edge locations.
The industry’s broadest portfolio of HCI solutions from Dell EMC is on track to become the market leader thanks to strong customer adoption – a great validation that our strategy is working to help address our customers’ key challenges.
For more thoughts on the value of the combined Dell EMC for HCI, check out Trey Layton’s blog from Dell EMC World, and, for more on VMware Cloud Foundation, check out Chad Sakac’s blog here.
