VMworld: From Dell EMC, VMware-Optimized Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud Portfolio Advancements

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, through its relationship with VMware, Inc., announces advancements across its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and hybrid cloud platforms portfolio to help simplify and speed customers’ IT transformations.

These announcements span the company’s portfolio of HCI solutions, hybrid cloud platforms and flexible Ready Systems, each designed to help modernize IT for VMware environments and data centers at any scale.

“Dell EMC leads the converged infrastructure market by listening to customers and offering the best and broadest portfolio of solutions to help support their IT transformations at any stage of readiness,” said Chad Sakac, president, converged platforms and solutions division, Dell EMC. “For customers who have standardized on VMware, the success of VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC demonstrate that customers are looking for the data center easy button. With today’s advancements, Dell EMC is offering even greater value for customers while making it easier for them to benefit from transformative IT models that fundamentally simplify and accelerate IT service delivery. This translates into real business results faster while reducing costs and risk.“

Turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure advancements
VxRail appliances, HCI appliances powered by vSAN and jointly engineered with VMware, will become available in September 2017 with the latest version software, VxRail 4.5. This release offers simple automation and lifecycle management for the latest VMware technologies – vSphere 6.5 update 1 and vSAN 6.6 update 1.

New enterprise benefits include:

Greater scalability – With batch multi-node scaling, the automated VxRail appliance deployment experience, optimized for a single appliance, can be applied to multi-node expansions.
Improved management -VxRail appliances offer support for REST-based APIs to programmatically deliver lifecycle management software upgrades to an entire VxRail cluster at once.
More security options – Advanced security includes vSAN Encryption, a native HCI security solution with data-at-rest encryption built into vSAN 6.6.

VxRack SDDC, a way to stand up a VMware-based, rack scale software defined data center environment, is now powered by the latest VMware technologies, including VMware Cloud Foundation, making it up to 80% more efficient at scale, providing more resources for applications with a single management cluster for the entire system.

Other benefits include:

Greater flexibility and performance – Forty company’s PowerEdge-based configurations include expanded CPU and all-flash storage options including higher capacity 3.84TB drives.
Integration with latest VMware software – Joint engineering with VMware delivers tight integration with VMware Cloud Foundation for automation and lifecycle management of vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6 and NSX 6.3 in a single stack.

Turnkey hybrid cloud platforms advancements
The company’s turnkey hybrid cloud platforms, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) and Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC), offer a simple path to a hybrid cloud operating model with full lifecycle management and one contact support to reduce customers’ operational risk while speeding cloud adoption. EHC is available globally on VxRack SDDC, offering customers a turnkey hybrid cloud experience on proven HCI with VMware’s software-defined data center stack. NHC built on VxRack SDDC also is available via an early access program.

Enterprise Hybrid Cloud continues to extend its capabilities
through comprehensive updates to both Dell EMC and VMware software,
which offers:

Increased scale and availability – Multi-site support extends to VxRail-based deployments, enabling organizations to start small and grow their hybrid cloud environment to up to four sites with VM-level DR and management through a single portal.
More public cloud options – Adding Microsoft Azure as an end-point offers customers flexibility to choose among public clouds.
Simplicity and automation – Support for accelerated installation of VxRack SDDC-based deployments and new automated upgrades to VxRail-based deployments reduces time for installation and upgrades.

Native Hybrid Cloud offers developer-ready infrastructure as an on-premises, turnkey Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform for building and running cloud-native apps.

NHC capabilities include:

Highly available deployments on VxRail – HA options with multi-site, multi-foundation and multi-availability zone configurations support global-scale deployments.
Workbench – A set of tools designed to help developers and operators new to Pivotal Cloud Foundry launches with the access testing tool and new deployment management Tool. this allows developers to quickly diagnose connectivity issues to legacy environments and IT operators can maintain control by setting rules and policies while developers can push applications securely to multiple locations via one click.

Ready solutions advancements
The company also develops a series of Ready Solutions that offer a simple and reliable way to acquire tested and validated solutions aligned to application and use case workloads that reduce risk and lower TCO.

Complementing the firm’s turnkey hybrid cloud platforms, the company announces a close collaboration with VMware and VMware Validated Designs to offer VMware Ready Systems from the company for customers wanting to deploy hybrid clouds on HCI. Ready Systems provide a simple, standard approach to building hybrid clouds while enabling customers to take on more of the deployment, configuration and lifecycle management responsibilities.

The VMware Ready Systems from the company will be pre-tested and highly repeatable cloud offerings that combine VMware cloud software with firm’sHCI options of VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC Systems for a Dell Technologies-aligned stack. Designed for customers and deployments of any size, they offer quick, easy and low-risk deployments with a lower capital investment than with the turnkey lifecycle and single support model of EHC and NHC.

Likewise, for customers who want to build and manage the lifecycle of their own HCI stacks, company’s vSAN Ready Nodes are available featuring the 14th generation of PowerEdge servers. The vSAN Ready Nodes deliver the capital economic benefits of HCI for organizations that prefer to take on more operational aspects otherwise addressed with turnkey HCI solutions. The entire company’s hyper-converged portfolio will transition to 14th generation PowerEdge servers by the end of 2017.

Industry context
For the first quarter of 2017, IDC research shows that HCI is by far the fastest growing converged systems segment, accounting for 25% of the overall converged systems market revenue with a growth rate of 64.7% year over year. It predicts the quickly growing HCI solutions market will surpass $7.6 billion by 2021.

With HCI offerings, such as VxRail Appliances and VxRack Systems, increasingly being used for core data center applications, they have become solid foundations for turnkey, hybrid cloud platforms such as the company’s Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud. As organizations continue to benefit from a combination of on-premises and public cloud resources, a recent IDC CloudView Survey finds that the vast majority – 79.7% – of large organizations (with 1,000 or more employees) report they already have a hybrid cloud strategy in place.

Availability:

VxRail Appliances 4.5 software will be available for new orders beginning in September 2017. Existing customers will be able to upgrade to VxRail 4.5 shortly thereafter in Q4.
VxRack SDDC, powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, is planned for global availability by end of September 2017.
Enterprise Hybrid Cloud on VxRack SDDC is available globally.
Native Hybrid Cloud on VxRack SDDC is available via an early access program with availability planned for 2018. Native Hybrid Cloud HA on VxRail and Workbench tools are available.
VMware Ready Systems from the company have planned global availability in 2H17.

Don Shackley, CIO, Steinberg Diagnostics Medical Imaging (SDMI), said: “SDMI’s data center continues to experience phenomenal storage and compute growth needs, addressed perfectly with easily scalable hyper-converged appliances. By moving to Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, we’ve been able to deliver the best healthcare services from on-demand, high-performance applications while meeting our desires to transform our IT operations and support. We have quickly seen improved application performance and have simplified everything by consolidating our data center monitoring and management to a single pane of glass.”

Shlomo Bistry, VP, production and infrastructure, Bank Leumi, said: “To remain competitive in our industry, we need to ensure that we have a world class IT environment to help us be as efficient as possible while also speeding our time to market with new IT services. With Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, used first to quickly stand-up our own private cloud, we are best able to achieve these goals and at the speed of a start-up company to better and more quickly support our customers.“

Eric Sheppard, research director, IDC, said: “HCI is the fastest-growing part of the converged infrastructure market, proven to support mission-critical capabilities for the core data center and as a foundation for the on-premises part of hybrid cloud. Organizations are increasingly realizing that the benefits of HCI can help drive profound changes in their data center and are turning to trusted infrastructure suppliers like Dell EMC when buying HCI solutions. Dell EMC’s broad spectrum of HCI entry points with turnkey solutions, including VxRail Appliances, VxRack Systems and XC Series, and flexible Ready Nodes, each with tight integration of hardware and software components, are helping organizations realize the potential of HCI’s simplicity.“

Resources:
Blog: Figuring Out Your IT Transformation Path When One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Blog: Realize Transformation with Dell EMC at VMworld US 2017
Blog: PowerEdge and VMware HCI Innovation for the New Data Center
Blog: Dell EMC Hybrid Cloud Advances to be Main Attraction at VMworld 2017
Blog: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Platform Diversity Leads to Strength in Numbers