The range of consumption options for our hyper-converged software expands significantly with Dell’s announcement today. Dell is extending its portfolio to include both the EMC VCE VxRail appliance family and the newly extended Virtual SAN Ready Nodes.
To back up a bit, in a busy February, VMware unveiled the following:
- On Feb. 10, we introduced the new version 6.2 release of Virtual SAN, our enterprise-grade native storage for VMware vSphere, which delivers up to 10x greater storage efficiency. In the 21 months since the initial release of Virtual SAN, our hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software has been sold to more than 3,000 customers. VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 is a pillar in the VMware Hyper-Converged Software stack, which consists of VMware vSphere, Virtual SAN and vCenter Server.
- As part of that launch, we also announced extensions to the Virtual SAN Ready Node program that empower our OEM partners to factory install VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN and to offer these extended Virtual SAN Ready Nodes with flexible licensing and unified support. At that time, VMware partners Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, and Super Micro had all publicly committed support for extended Virtual SAN Ready Nodes.
- On Feb. 16, we jointly announced with EMC the new VxRail appliance family. The VxRail appliance family brings together the best of EMC and VMware, including VMware’s leading Hyper-Converged Software and EMC’s rich data services and leading systems management capabilities. This product family offers customers a tightly-integrated turnkey appliance and the most streamlined way to procure, deploy, and support VMware Hyper-Converged Software.
Today’s News from Dell
Starting today, Dell’s hyper-converged portfolio will include the EMC VCE VxRail appliance family. VCE VxRail appliances are available in a broad set of configurations for small to enterprise-sized deployments and scale to match a variety of workloads with a range of configurations. VxRail is a very compelling hyper-converged infrastructure appliance offering very well-aligned with Dell’s market reach and we very much look forward to their success with it.
Dell also announced that they are expanding the existing large set of Virtual SAN Ready Node certified platforms to include options for factory integration of VMware Hyper-Converged Software. Dell’s Virtual SAN Ready Nodes already provide our mutual customers tremendous flexibility in server form factors and configurations to support diverse workloads and deployment scenarios; the new factory integration option makes it even easier for customers to take advantage of this flexibility.
Lastly, Dell announced a new Dell Hybrid Cloud Platform with VMware Virtual SAN. This reference architecture will provide a full-featured and optimized private and hybrid cloud platform, along with end-to-end automation capabilities from the private to the public cloud.
Read more about Dell’s news in the press release here.
Closing Thoughts
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) provides the best building block for the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) because it is simple, highly scalable, high performing and cost effective. Together with Dell, EMC and our VMware ecosystem partners, we are empowering our mutual customers with a diverse set of consumption options to deploy, consume and manage hyper-converged infrastructure — enabling organizations to rapidly realize all of the benefits that HCI offers without sacrificing choice or flexibility.
