VCE Expands Converged Infrastructure Portfolio

VCE, trademark of VCE company LLC, announced an expansion to its converged infrastructure portfolio with a series of platform and software innovations focused on speeding and simplifying the customer journey to the hybrid cloud.

VCE is expanding the scope of converged infrastructure integration from physical hardware elements to include application and cloud infrastructure, driving an evolution from converged infrastructure to converged solutions.

VCE introduced advancements to its converged solutions portfolio:

• Vscale Architecture is a ‘scale up’ and ‘scale out’ architecture that delivers simplicity and speed at data center scale. Vscale architecture leverages a next-generation converged fabric to interconnect multiple converged infrastructure systems and data center elements, providing optimized, on-demand resource sharing.

Vblock System 300

• VxBlock Systems are a family of converged infrastructure systems designed to enable  flexibility in system components for customers. The first VxBlock System announced will offer Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) or VMware NSX as a customer choice for software-defined networking (SDN) functionality, along with Cisco networking and computing, EMC storage and data protection, and VMware virtualization and virtualization management. VxBlock Systems will receive the same ‘VCE Experience’ of factory-based pre-integration, pre-testing and pre-validation with seamless component-level updates, ongoing lifecycle assurance, and unified single-call support. Additional VxBlock Systems will be introduced throughout 2015.

• Vision Intelligent Operations 3.0 is an update to the company’s converged infrastructure management software for delivering operational simplicity through a consistent, accurate, and common systems view. VCE Vision software capabilities have been expanded to provide unified intelligence across multiple VCE converged infrastructure systems – either independent or as part of a Vscale architecture – enabling efficient multi-system management and converged operations at scale.

“VCE’s mission since inception has been to free IT organizations from expending resources and effort managing infrastructure, so they could deliver next-generation services to their end users,” said Praveen Akkiraju, CEO, VCE. “VCE’s approach is unique and differentiated as we focus on understanding the customer problem, integrating new technologies in a high-performance solution supported with a single call. This new set of platforms and solutions represents the first phase of major expansion for the scale and scope of the VCE portfolio and value proposition.“

Today converged infrastructure is a way for organizations to deploy next-generation IT that enables them to create a bridge between their current applications and the cloud. While new technologies continue to arrive at a rapid pace, VCE’s position as the market leader1, is built on a differentiated solutions approach combined with the trust of customers.

“As a pioneer in the converged infrastructure market, VCE exemplifies the desire of IT professionals to distance themselves from being in the infrastructure integration business by embracing modern IT consumption models,” said Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “The enhanced spectrum of solutions provides enhanced levels of scalability, an open-door design and ways for IT professionals to invest in VCE-enabled software-defined data center solutions that provide strategic longevity.“

Converged solutions portfolio
In addition to the advancements announced, VCE has recently introduced multiple offerings to expand its portfolio to deliver a range of converged platforms and solutions designed to provide speed, scale and simplicity, and accelerate customers’ journey to the hybrid cloud:

• VCE technology extensions are pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated hardware extensions that enable additional flexibility and scalability for new and existing Vblock Systems and VxBlock Systems. Company’s technology extensions enable customers to expnd their converged infrastructure with additional storage and compute resources – including Islion, XtremIO and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) – with the same factory-built VCE Experience including component-level upgrades and single-call support.

• VCE foundations for federation enterprise hybrid cloud is a converged solution designed to accelerate the deployment and management of hybrid cloud environments. The solution drives a greater degree of convergence by extending the standardized repeatable practices of the VC Experience to the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, providing factory integration of additional VMware and EMC technologies including VMware NSX network virtualization, VMware vRealize management and orchestration software, and EMC ViPR software-defined storage. The solution includes technology onramps to VMware vCloud Air, enabling customers with seamless management, workload migration and DR between their private and public cloud environments.

Vblock System 500

• The Vblock System 540, announced in October 2014 and shipping in volume, is an all-flash-based converged infrastructure system for consolidating mixed workloads such as private clouds, end-user computing, databases and other latency-sensitive applications. The Vblock System 540 is powered by EMC’s market-leading XtremIO all-flash arrays, next-generation Cisco Unified Computing and Cisco Nexus ACI-Ready networking.

• The Vblock System 740, announced in October 2014 and shipping in volume, is an intelligent converged infrastructure, with performance, capacity and availability for mission-critical applications. The Vblock System 740 is powered by next-generation Cisco Unified Computing, Cisco Nexus ACI-Ready networking and VMAX 3 storage.

• VCE Foundations for Cisco UCS Director provides the VCE Experience for cloud management software from Cisco on Vblock Systems and VxBlock Systems to simplify deployment and management of cloud computing. Integrated with converged infrastructure and Vision software, this out-of-the-box cloud solution supports rapid, cost-effective implementation of private or hybrid cloud infrastructure with the lowest risk for cloud management environments based on Cisco UCS director with the same factory-built VCE Experience, including component-level upgrades and single-call support.

“VCE Vscale Architecture will allow us the flexibility of using the cloud to best serve our students, faculty practitioners, support service teams and other operational leaders. This flexibility creates a state we want to be in and we believe VCE will get us there,” said Michael Sajor, CIO, Apollo Education Group, Inc., a large private education providers

“VCE’s launch today helps customers simplify IT data center architectures, and shifts the conversation with CIOs to strategic business decisions. VCE will expand the scale and scope of its solutions, enabling our joint customers to take better advantage of hybrid cloud and next-generation IT opportunities,” said Tom Tormey, VP, technology alliances, EMC.

“VMware and VCE are accelerating customers’ path to the hybrid cloud. By delivering new solutions that integrate VMware’s innovative VMware NSX network virtualization and vRealize management solutions, VCE is offering converged solutions that enable customers to adopt a brave, new model of IT with confidence.” said Raghu Raghuram, EVP and GM, software-defined data center division, VMware, Inc.

“Applications are driving new demands for our customers’ data centers – whether they are physical, virtual, bare metal or in the cloud. To move at the speed of business, our customers need to deliver applications at scale and in a highly secure manner where they need them and when they need them. By leveraging Cisco Nexus 9000 and Cisco MDS as core building blocks of the Vscale architecture, VCE solutions can dramatically enhance the delivery of applications with speed, simplicity and scale. We believe Vblock and VxBlock systems with Cisco ACI will create a new gold standard for application-centric converged infrastructure delivering more value to our customers and accelerating data center and cloud build-outs.” said Ish Limkakeng, VP, Marketing, Insieme business unit, Cisco Systems, Inc.

Vscale Architecture, VxBlock Systems and Vision Intelligent Operations 3.0 will be orderable in Q2 2015. VCE converged solutions are available from VCE and its global network of business partners.