Recently at VMworld 2014, Dell unveiled a broad range of innovative solutions across its enterprise portfolio that optimise and simplify management and productivity within customers’ VMware virtualisation environments.
The new offerings showcase Dell and VMware’s long-standing and strong partnership to build unique, industry-leading product and service solutions, which help customers achieve more from their IT investments.
Industry forces such as cloud computing, big data, the internet of things, mobility, and software-defined IT are leading companies to think differently about traditional IT – services based on transactional system-of-records – and compelling businesses to re-examine their approach to creating, storing, moving and analysing information. Many are moving toward an approach that more closely mirrors new IT – business models and processes that are subscriber or relationship-oriented and require support for high-volume and high-velocity data processing.
Taking a customer-first approach, Dell supports businesses wherever they are on their journey, from traditional IT to new IT, by adding to its portfolio of hyper-converged and software-defined offerings with new solutions for VMware environments:
* Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL bridge the capital and operational cost savings of new IT solutions while maintaining compatibility with traditional IT workloads. The appliances help customers streamline the deployment and scale-out of their virtual infrastructure and workloads.
* A Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) reference architecture and new Dell Storage and VMware integrations help customers simplify traditional IT solutions including management and access of data and applications for traditional VMware environments.
Dell introduced the Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL, designed specifically for VMware environments, to help customers reduce common challenges associated with infrastructure and workload delivery.
The new hyper-converged appliances, the latest additions to Dell’s broad engineered systems portfolio, deliver a transformative end-to-end user experience aimed at virtual infrastructure, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), private cloud and general-purpose workloads running in virtual environments.
Using Dell servers with VMware EVO: RAIL software, the new systems are scalable, manageable and offer fast time-to-value, along with a simplified management experience that makes the appliances easy to use for customers of all sizes. Dell is delivering two editions of its Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL:
* Dell Engineered Solution for VMware EVO: RAIL, Virtual Infrastructure Edition – A solution for general purpose workloads which enables customer rapidly deploy and scale VMware based virtual infrastructure.
* Dell Engineered Solution for VMware EVO: RAIL, VMware Horizon 6 – VDI specific solution that allows customers to quickly roll and scale infrastructure for virtual desktops to end users based on business demand.
Each appliance will be sold as a single item with hardware, software and support bundled together. Both editions are built leveraging Dell’s deep heritage and expertise with dense data centre and server designs. The appliances includes an impressive four server nodes within a single 2U Server.
Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL is an important addition to Dell’s growing engineered solutions portfolio. Dell brings to bear its expertise and industry leadership in x86 server architecture, hardware systems management, web scale deployments and expertise with VMware environments to help develop and co-engineer the appliance.
The result is a tightly integrated hardware and software stack that delivers business agility while reducing a customer’s total cost of ownership.
“Dell has been a trusted partner of Oakland USD for many years. The company embodies the start-up mentality while being a stable industry leader with long-term vision,” said John Krull, Information Technology Officer, Oakland Unified School District. “The Dell Engineered Solutions for VMware EVO: RAIL offer ease-of-use, simplicity of deployment, and pay-as-you-go scalability that is ideal for our virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) initiatives.”
Dell Engineered Solution for VMware EVO: RAIL, Virtual Infrastructure Edition will be available in September 2014, and Dell Engineered Solution for VMware EVO: RAIL, VMware Horizon 6, will be available later this year.
Dell announced a series of new Dell Storage and VMware integrations to help customers simplify management and access of data and applications for traditional VMware environments:
* Dell Storage PS and SC Series now offer support for VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vC Ops), for greater visibility into the performance, capacity and health of their virtualised IT infrastructure.
* Dell will offer Virtual Volumes (VVols) support with Dell Storage PS Series at launch of Virtual Volumes and SC Series to follow, enabling VM level storage management and data services for streamlined management, monitoring and data protection in virtualised environments.
* Dell FS8600 NAS appliances will offer VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), in Q1 2015, to speed up VMware operations with Dell’s file system solutions.
Additionally, to support and help optimise traditional IT in VMware environments, Dell also announced a new Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) reference architecture based on Dell servers, networking, and the new Dell Storage SC4020 arrays, which begin shipping globally this week. The reference architecture offers customers a jump start on an example 1 800-user VDI hosting environment with detailed performance characteristics of a single 2U Dell Storage SC4020 all-flash array.