Dell EMC Simplifies Hybrid Cloud Adoption With Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Solution

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, announced that its hybrid cloud platform, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC), will be available for the first time on VxRail appliances, the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure offering that has seen substantial market adoption since its launch one year ago.

As organizations increasingly move towards hybrid cloud as an enabler for IT transformation and adopt hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) for mission critical workloads, EHC on VxRail appliances allows organizations to start small and grow as their demand for hybrid cloud services expand.

“It’s clear that enterprises are moving to hybrid cloud models, and they’re looking for us to help simplify standing-up and managing these environments, which inevitably includes multiple cloud stacks, cross-cloud technologies and a combination of various off-premises and on-premises clouds,” said Chad Sakac, president, converged platforms and solutions division, Dell EMC. “HCI infrastructure has quickly proven effective for core data center workloads and is becoming the answer for the on-premises part of hybrid cloud. Adding Dell EMC VxRail Appliances as an infrastructure option for Dell EMC EHC helps us simplify hybrid cloud for smaller enterprises and a broader set of customers.“

The VxRail appliance family of integrated, preconfigured and pre-tested HCI appliances offers the HCI appliances powered by VMware, Inc.‘ vSAN and jointly engineered with VMware.

Since VxRail appliances launched a year ago today, the company has sold more than 8,000 VxRail nodes-exceeding 65PB of storage and 100,000 cores-to more than 1,000 customers in dozens of industries across 78 countries.

According to IDC research, revenue from Dell Technologies’ HCI portfolio, including VxRail appliances, VxRack systems and XC series, outgrew the total HCI market – one of the fastest growing IT markets – by more than two-fold and represents 28% of hyper-converged systems sold in the third quarter of 2016. ⁽¹⁾

EHC on VxRail helps meet rising customer demands for an HCI-based turnkey hybrid cloud solution. Industry analyst and research firm 451 Research notes in a report that three out of four hyper-converged deployments are in the core data center, and hybrid cloud is the next frontier for HCI.

Click to enlarge

EHC on VxRail appliances
EHC is delivered as a fully designed, integrated and tested engineered solution, enabling an IT organization to deliver value to the business considerably faster than by building their own hybrid cloud infrastructure. EHC on VxRail appliances offers customers a turnkey hybrid cloud optimized for deployments ranging from 200 to 1,000 VMs, and:

• A platform optimized for smaller deployments, offering a cost-effective, smaller footprint with the flexibility to start small and grow as requirements evolve.

• Simplified, automated installations of the EHC software stack on VxRail appliances that reduces deployment time, costs and risk.

• Subscription-based support with professional services that allows organizations to take advantage of the latest EHC enhancements.

An Evaluator Group study, demonstrates why hybrid cloud is the true end state cloud model. The elastic economics of the public cloud (including Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Engine and others) are a fit for workloads that will scale in unknown or transient ways. As the report shows, for workload that will exist for years, simple, cost effective HCI platforms can deliver a better TCO for the on-premises half of the hybrid cloud model.

Click to enlarge

VxRail appliances customer momentum
The firm has experienced strong customer demand for VxRail appliances, exceeding expectations and placing the company on track to be the industry’s top HCI appliance provider. One year from its launch, VxRail appliances have proven that HCI is an approach for mainstream IT as customers increasingly use these systems for data center core applications.

For example, The CSI Companies, one of growing US staffing firms, turned to VxRail appliances to run core applications supporting its quickly expanding business. With VxRail, The customer simplified IT management and operations while improving performance to offer employees faster access to applications and data and reduce payroll processing time from hours overnight to 15 minutes.

“Since implementing the VxRail appliance, our team has been able to focus less on routine management, and more on delivering desired business value,” said Matt Greaves, director, IT, The CSI Companies. “When we invested in the VxRail appliance, we were looking for a ‘wow’ factor. As soon as the implementation was completed, we couldn’t believe the performance – how fast everything processed and how crashes were completely eliminated.“

College of the Ozarks, the Missouri-based liberal arts college, has deployed VxRail appliances to increase its overall IT system performance and reliability in support of its faculty and students. The college’s IT staff has found that VxRail’s simple management has freed-up time to work on other projects.

“Our Dell EMC VxRail appliances require much less administrative time and lets us deploy VMs much more quickly than our previous, conventional IT infrastructure,” said Frankie Youngblood, administrator, systems and security, College of the Ozarks. “VxRail simply works. It’s given us back time to work on IT services and new applications to help our faculty and students, which is fundamentally more valuable than time otherwise spent making sure our IT systems are running smoothly every day.“

Global ERP software vendor, proALPHA Business Solutions GmbH, powers its academy cloud platform with VxRail. The platform is simpler for the team to manage from its HQs in Germany and enables customers around the world to access its online training programs much faster and easier in order to get more out of their software solutions.

“Dell EMC VxRail appliances are a small, powerful way to accomplish our business needs,” said Markus Gehm, cloud specialist, ProALPHA Business Solutions. “VxRail has enabled us to transform the way we deliver training to our customers, allowing us to deliver better service to customers at no increased cost to our business.“

Henry Baltazar, research director, 451 Research, said: “With the HCI market growing relatively rapidly over the last few years, Dell EMC has grown its own presence with last year’s introduction and subsequent customer adoption of VxRail appliances. As customers are increasingly ramping-up their HCI deployments, hybrid cloud is the next obvious destination. This makes the combination of Dell EMC EHC and VxRail a worthy solution for consideration.“

Yanbing Li, SVP and GM, storage and availability business unit, VMware, Inc., said: “Dell EMC VxRail appliances, powered by VMware vSAN and vSphere, provide a simple, cost-effective hyper-converged solution that can help organizations support a wide range of applications and workloads. The addition of VxRail appliances as a central infrastructure option for EHC is a natural fit, and we look forward to continued innovation with Dell EMC as we help customers simplify their IT operations, while empowering them to lower capital and operational costs.“

Jean-Noel Olivier, deputy CIO, Bordeaux Métropole, said: “Our Bordeaux Métropole’s IT organization faced a challenge as France’s new urban Métropoles model meant that IT departments from 14 major cities merged with their respective smaller surrounding cities in 2015. We needed to unify our workforce, operations and infrastructure and make the transition to an effective service provider to meet a 2017 deadline for delivering responsive government services and effectively serving all 750,000 citizens across the Métropole. With great success, we turned to Dell EMC and its EHC, which has given us the opportunity to harmonize our processes and consolidate 1,000 applications in a flexible and secure environment.“

DeMond Sullivan, CTO, Cumberland Group, a company’s channel partner, said: “Dell EMC VxRail appliances have become increasingly intriguing as a market leading hyper-converged infrastructure offering for customers struggling with the time they spend on routine data center management when they know IT staff could be providing higher value for their organizations. This is a perfect marriage of the simplicity and value of VxRail appliances with the turnkey, quick to deploy and ease of management from Dell EMC EHC platform. This combination makes standing up a robust hybrid cloud even more accessible and cost-effective for smaller and medium-sized enterprise deployments.“

EHC with VxRail appliances has planned availability on March 31, 2017.

⁽¹⁾ Based on IDC WW Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker, December 22, 2016.

Additional resources:
Pulse blog: Start Small and Grow with EHC on VxRail
Reflections blog: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud – Smaller and Simpler with VxRail
VBLOG blog: 2016 – The Year That Dell EMC changed hyper-converged
Analyst report: Pathfinder Report: Transform your Business with HCI (451 Research, February 2017)
Analyst report: TCO Analysis of VxRail and Public Cloud (Evaluator Group, February 2017)
Video: Deploy Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on VxRail Hyper-Converged Appliances 
Video: VxRail Customers