EMC and VMware last night introduced the new VCE VxRail Appliance family, and integrated and jointly engineered hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) for VMware environments.
The VxRail Appliance family brings together the best of EMC and VMware including EMC rich data services and leading systems management capabilities with VMware’s hyper-converged software that includes VMware vSphere, vCenter Server and VMware Virtual SAN – all in a single product family with one point of support.
Hybrid storage or all-flash VxRail Appliances extend and simplify VMware customer environments and deliver key performance and capacity advantages in a simple, turnkey and scalable HCIA.
IT organisations tasked with supporting growing business demands for new applications and services with limited budgets and resources don’t want to waste time constantly evaluating and integrating hardware, software, and networking solutions, nor do they have time to learn new operational tools and processes. The new hyper-converged VCE VxRail Appliances extend the hallmark benefits of VCE converged infrastructure – increased agility, simplified operations and lower risk – to small businesses, medium-sized enterprises, and department or regional offices for virtualisation and end-user computing use cases.
The jointly engineered VCE VxRail Appliances tightly integrate virtualisation, compute, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support. Organisations can start small, with a couple of virtual machines (VMs), and scale to thousands of VMs with a predictable, “pay-as-you-grow” approach.
VxRail Appliances are available in a broad set of configurations and scale points. Entry systems for small and medium businesses and remote offices start at a list price of $60 000 and options for performance intensive workloads have more than 76Tb of flash – more than double flash in other hyper-converged appliances.
VxRail Appliances are loaded with integrated EMC mission-critical data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. EMC RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines provides per-VM replication and automated disaster recovery for critical workloads. Virtual SAN active-active stretch clusters provide site level, zero data loss protection. Integrated vSphere Data Protection provides backup and recovery using existing tools and can optionally backup to Data Domain for centralized storage and management.
VCE VxRail Manager
provides deep hardware awareness with up-to-the-minute holistic notifications about the state of applications, VMs, and appliance leveraging VMware Log Insight capturing events. VxRail Appliances leverage EMC cloud tiering to seamlessly extend to more than 20 public clouds such as VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and very shortly Virtustream, to more securely expand storage capacity without limits, providing an additional 10Tb of on-demand cloud storage per appliance.
EMC and VMware uniquely simplify the infrastructure lifecycle by eliminating constant evaluation cycles and testing with continuous integration of advancements in x86 technologies and implementation of the latest enhancements to VMware vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN delivering leading efficiency with data reduction technologies – deduplication, compression and erasure coding. The net result: IT organizations can focus more on innovation by creating an automated, dynamic infrastructure that adapts to their business demands.
Customers get a familiar experience with management through VMware vCenter Server. VxRail Appliances also seamlessly integrate with the broader VMware vSphere ecosystem, fully supporting existing management, automation, monitoring, and availability tools from VMware to dramatically simplify IT operations, while enabling lower costs. Additionally VxRail Appliances integrate with VMware’s cloud management platform and end-user computing solutions, including VMware vRealize(r) Operations and VMware Horizon Air.
As IT organizations standardise on converged infrastructure as the foundation for their next generation data centers, EMC is extending its leading converged infrastructure to smaller business and the enterprise edge with VxRail Appliances. EMC’s broad converged infrastructure portfolio helps customers deliver world-class cloud and mobile ready IT services to their business, including the only portfolio that can natively replicate between core data center infrastructure such as VCE’s Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack Systems, and edge solutions such as the VxRail Appliance for seamless, consistent operations. VCE Vision Intelligent Operations software includes VxRail appliances in a complete view of all VCE resources from the core data center to remote and distributed locations.
“The new VCE VxRail Appliance family puts IT organizations on a path to eliminating complexity and collapsing cost structures with hyper-converged infrastructure while leveraging their existing VMware investments. The VxRail Appliance completes our broad portfolio of Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack Systems to provide customers with a converged infrastructure that meets nearly every workload from the edge to the core regardless of size,” says Tom O’Reilly, VCE chief technology officer: EMEA at EMC – Converged Platforms.
“With the new VCE VxRail Appliances, powered by VMware hyper-converged software, IT organizations are empowered with a solution that is easy to use and can help them drive innovation as rapid as the business demands. Together, EMC and VMware have worked closely to enable our mutual customers to realize the value of a tightly integrated, hyper-converged solution,” says Yanbing Li, senior vice-president and GM: storage and availability business unit at VMware.
