Johannesburg, 23 Feb 2016
Story highlights
* Delivers a jointly engineered, simple and proven turnkey VCE Appliance Family for use cases including small/midsize data centres and for enterprise departmental and edge environments.
* Incorporates software from EMC/VCE and VMware including VMware's hyper-converged software.
* Starts small with a list price of $60 000 and scales to match a variety of workloads with a range of configurations including all-flash options with 2x more flash than any other hyper-converged infrastructure appliance.
* Seamlessly integrates with existing VMware ecosystem management solutions for streamlined deployment and management in VMware environments.
* Integrated VCE VxRail Manager for deep element management and monitoring along with a full suite of best-of-breed data services from EMC and VMware, including deduplication, compression, replication and backup
* EMC cloud tiering to public clouds, such as Virtustream, VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
* Expands one of the industry's most comprehensive and complete converged and hyper-converged portfolio, including VCE's Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack Systems, that uniquely cover every customer, every workload and every scale point with the ability to manage any combination of infrastructure centrally.
EMC (NYSE: EMC) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) today announced the new VCE VxRail Appliance family, the only 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 leading hyper-converged software that includes VMware vSphere, vCenter Server and VMware Virtual SAN, the simple, powerful, efficient software defined storage natively integrated with vSphere - 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 easily 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 easily and non-disruptively 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 76 TB of flash - over 2X more flash than any other hyper-converged appliance.
VxRail Appliances are fully 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 organisations 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 Operations and VMware Horizon Air.
As IT organisations standardise on converged infrastructure as the foundation for their next generation data centres, 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 centre 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 organisations 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," said Tom O'Reilly, VCE CTO EMEA, EMC - Converged Platforms.
"With the new VCE VxRail Appliances, powered by VMware hyper-converged software, IT organisations 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 realise the value of a tightly integrated, hyper-converged solution," said Yanbing Li, senior vice president and general manager, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware.
Customer quotes
"We had a flawless experience setting up the VxRail Appliance. With the tightness of the VMware and EMC integration, everything worked like clockwork. The simplicity of deploying and managing the VxRail Appliance enables us to free up our engineers to do what they do best, help our customers deploy IT and imaging solutions that impact patient care," said Fred Sinclair, Product Manager, Technology Solutions, FUJIFILM Medical Systems USA.
"I can already appreciate the cost and time-saving benefits we could gain by deploying a condensed, self-contained, standard 2U hyper-converged rack using best of breed storage and compute technology. For trackside, the savings in freight charges alone would be approximately $200 000 per season, and the simplified set-up of the VxRail means we could be up and running much quicker at every race, offering a significantly improved user experience," said Antony Smith, IS Infrastructure Manager, Renault Sport Formula One Team.
"Software-defined models are changing the operating economics of the data centre. VxRail will enable our customers to simplify IT operations and lower associated costs, while at the same time offering more flexibility to serve their rapidly changing business needs. As an all-in-one solution backed by a federation of industry leaders in software-defined converged infrastructure, our customers will appreciate the proven technology of EMC coupled with VMware software innovation and support from a leader in integrated infrastructure, VCE," said Bob Olwig, Vice President of Business Strategy and Innovation, World Wide Technology.
Analyst quote:
"According to ESG's research on hybrid cloud trends, 70% of IT respondents plan to invest in HCI over the next 24 months. Moreover, 85% of these same respondents indicated that they plan on leveraging their existing investments in private cloud software, like VMware vCenter Server and vCloud Director framework technology, to serve as the foundation for their hybrid cloud environment. As such, the new VMware and VCE VxRail Appliance could make for a very compelling offering to for those looking to implement a highly flexible and highly scalable hyper-converged infrastructure appliance, with private and hybrid cloud computing capabilities, while still leveraging the same VMware management tools that they have been using for years," said Colm Keegan, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.
Availability
VxRail Appliances are sold by EMC, VCE and their channel partners, and are orderable today. All-flash VxRail Appliances with modern data reduction capabilities will be available in Q2 2016.
Interact with EMC and VMware Online:
* Read EMC executive perspective on EMC Reflections Blog here
* Read the EMC Pulse Blog here
* Read the VMware Virtual Blocks Blog here
* Check out the ESG video
* Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and SocialSphere
* Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook
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