EMC and VMware announced today VCE VxRail, a new industry leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance (HCIA). Developed jointly by EMC and VMware, VxRail is a fully integrated, preconfigured and tested HCI appliance powered by VMware Hyper-Converged Software and is one of the easiest ways to stand up a hyper-converged infrastructure environment.
According to IDC, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest growing segment of the converged infrastructure market. VMware Hyper-Converged Software (HCS) transforms industry-standard x86 servers and directly-attached storage into radically simple Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, eliminating high IT costs, management complexity, and performance limitations.
A big reason for the strong customer adoption of VMware HCS is the unique architecture of VMware Virtual SAN, a radically simple enterprise-class storage solution. It is embedded in the vSphere kernel and sits directly in the I/O path, allowing it to deliver very high performance and low latencies. Virtual SAN is also completely converged with vSphere and managed through the familiar vCenter interface, making it the simplest hyper-converged storage on the market. Last week we launched the 4th edition of Virtual SAN (version 6.2) which continues to drive simplicity, performance, cost-efficiency, and includes key new capabilities such as deduplication, compression and eraser coding.
Why VxRail?
VxRail takes full advantage of the native capabilities of VMware HCS and extends the HCI experience with simplified lifecycle management and extended data protection through onboard EMC technology, including backup and replication to all leading cloud providers. VCE VxRail is also part of the VCE ecosystem of appliances, blocks, and racks, providing a direct path to a fully software-defined data center.
VxRail provides cost-efficient entry points for as few as 40 VMs, while supporting single node scale expansion for up to 64 nodes and over 3,000 VMs. Offered through EMC and channel partners, VxRail is especially well suited for deployment in medium and small business, remote and branch office, and enterprise VDI environments.
True Appliance
Built-to-order hardware with configurations to match most use cases, VxRail offers choice of next-generation Intel processors, variable RAM, storage, and cache capacity with increased horsepower per appliance, allowing customers to buy what they need now and providing a predictable, “pay-as-you grow” approach for future scale out.
In the near-future, VxRail will offer a choice of all-flash nodes for maximum performance and scale for mission critical workloads and applications that demand low latency and hybrid nodes that blend performance and cost across a range of processing power, memory and storage.
With a single point of global 24×7 support for both the Hardware and Software, and backed by ESRS for dial-home secure remote connection for monitoring, diagnosis, and repair, you can trust that VxRail Appliance provides the ultimate appliance support on the market.
In Conclusion
Software innovation is what makes HCI possible, delivering compute, storage, networking and management as software. VMware Hyper-Converged Software is enabled by a broad ecosystem of HCI vendors with many consumption options. I am excited that our close partnership with EMC via a joint engineering effort allows us to bring innovations in the software stack and appliances to our customers, and to offer our customers the best HCI experience.
