VxRail, VCE Hyper-Converged Appliance Starting at $60,000

Highlights:

• Delivers a jointly engineered, simple and proven turnkey VCE appliance Family for use cases including small/midsize data centers 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 suite of 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 a complete converged and hyper-converged portfolio, including VCE’s Vblock, VxBlock and VxRack Systems, that cover every customer, every workload and every scale point with the ability to manage any combination of infrastructure centrally.
   

EMC Corporation and VMware, Inc. announced the VCE VxRail appliance family, an 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 data services and systems management capabilities with VMware’s hyper-converged software that includes vSphere, vCenter Server and VMware Virtual SAN, a 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 performance and capacity advantages in a simple, turnkey and scalable HCIA.
 
IT organizations 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 VxRail appliances extend the hallmark benefits of VCE converged infrastructure – agility, simplified operations and lower risk – to SMBs, and department or regional offices for virtualization and end-user computing use cases.
 
The jointly engineered VxRail appliances integrate virtualization, compute, storage and data protection in one system with a single point of support. Organizations can start small, with a couple of VMs, and non-disruptively scale to thousands of VMs with a ‘pay-as-you-grow’ approach. VxRail appliances are available in a set of configurations and scale points. Entry systems for SMBs and remote offices start at a list price of $60,000 and options for performance intensive workloads have more than 76TB of flash – over 2X more flash than other hyper-converged appliance.
 
VxRail appliances are loaded with integrated EMC mission-critical data services including replication, backup and cloud tiering at no additional charge. EMC RecoverPoint for VMs provides per-VM replication and automated DR 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 EMC Data Domain for centralized storage and management.

VCE VxRail Manager provides 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 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 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 vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN delivering efficiency with data reduction technologies – deduplication, compression and erasure coding. 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 integrate with the broader vSphere ecosystem, supporting existing management, automation, monitoring, and availability tools from VMware to 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 organizations standardize on converged infrastructure as the foundation for their next generation data centers, EMC is extending its converged infrastructure to smaller business and the enterprise edge with VxRail appliances. EMC’s converged infrastructure portfolio helps customers deliver cloud and mobile ready IT services to their business, including a 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 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,” said Chad Sakac, president, VCE, the converged platforms division, EMC.
 
“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,” said Yanbing Li, senior VP and GM, storage and availability business unit, VMware.
 
“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 U.S.A., Inc.
 
“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 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 center. 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, VP of business strategy and innovation, World Wide Technology, Inc.

“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.
 
VxRail Appliances are sold by EMC, VCE and their channel partners, and are orderable. All-flash VxRail appliances with data reduction capabilities will be available in Q2 2016.