Results Realized: Dell VxRail Drives Efficiency and ROI

By Nancy Hurley, director, multicloud infrastructure product marketing, Dell Technologies, Inc.

We head to Las Vegas, NV, for VMware Explore 2023 where we’ll officially introduce the latest-gen VxRail, built on the 4^th-Gen Xeon Scalable processors.

The latest VxRail will bring 100% more processor cores, 63% faster memory with DDR5 and a 300% increase in PCIe performance with PCIe Gen5 compared to 14^th-Gen VxRail. ⁽¹⁾ This performance improvement results in less required floor space – improving energy efficiency.

You’ll also see even more configuration flexibility with up to 50% more PCIe slots, ⁽¹⁾ more storage capacity and more performant GPU options. This powerful hardware package is capable of running the most demanding data-intensive workloads such as virtualization, AI, ML and GPU-accelerated workloads. As the AI landscape continues to grow, the built-in AI acceleration engine, Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX), delivers a significant leap in performance for certain DL workloads, driving up to 10x faster inference and training vs CPU alone, as well as cost savings through CPU offloading. ⁽²⁾

At VMware Explore, we’ll also have the opportunity to engage with several VxRail customers, some of whom recently participated in the IDC Business Value of Dell VxRail assessment. Once again, the results speak for themselves: our customers continue to realize incredible benefits with VxRail. IDC interviewed multiple organizations using VxRail to identify and quantify measurable benefits they now experience as a result of deploying VxRail across their IT landscape. Customers were interviewed across several verticals, including entertainment, non-profit, agriculture, education, manufacturing, state and local government, pharmaceutical and logistics.

Regardless of their size or vertical, our customers reported they have seen an average of $54,000 annual benefit per Dell VxRail node deployed. This contributed to a 463% 5-year ROI, 11 months to payback and a 61% lower total 5-year cost of operations. ⁽³⁾

VxRail advantage
Since launching VxRail seven years ago, we have been aggressively innovating. We continuously release new features and functionality (over 2 dozen releases and hundreds of new features just in the last 2 years) to improve serviceability and support new use cases to deliver the most value to our customers – whether they are modernizing the data center, deploying multicloud or running applications in remote edge locations.

One of the core benefits of deploying VxRail across core, edge and cloud deployments is the consistent operational efficiencies delivered through our VxRail HCI System Software. The management simplicity delivered through extensive automation and orchestration is VxRail’s key differentiator in the HCI market, providing global cluster management, LCM health checks and automated operations across the entire infrastructure.

It’s this automation that helped our customers’ IT infrastructure management teams be 61% more efficient, according to the IDC white paper. ⁽³⁾ This enables IT teams to spend more time focusing on value-added business activities instead of day-to-day operations and maintenance.

“The greatest benefit that my organization has had is that we have been able to grow without having to increase staff because of the standardization provided by VxRail. We had 24 clusters and we had roughly three engineers supporting it when I got here. And we still have 3 engineers, and we’ve more than tripled in size and have not added support staff,” said a Dell customer

More agility with less risk
IT teams are being challenged to be more agile and innovative to bring additional revenue to their company’s bottom line. In one of IDC’s findings, our customers described how VxRail helps them deploy new servers, storage and VMs with more speed and agility. For instance, they calculated customers can deploy new physical servers 79% faster and new storage 54% faster. (3)

VxRail HCI System Software delivers an automated, operational experience, as well as automated updates. This means customers spend less time planning, scheduling and implementing upgrades to take advantage of software and hardware improvements. IDC calculated VxRail customers experience 68% fewer unplanned outages per year on average. (3)

One customer commented: “VxRail has been extremely resilient and provided us with an extremely high level of availability. In six-and-a-half years, we’ve not had a single failure in any of our clusters that took an entire cluster down.”

That kind of reliability is why customers continue to expand their VxRail footprint across their IT landscape.

Putting VxRail to Work for You
“IDC research demonstrates how study participants used VxRail to optimize their IT infrastructure costs with a fully integrated, high-performing platform for running business-critical workloads. VxRail enabled their IT teams to deliver more value by reducing their day-to-day operational work, thereby freeing up time to work on high-value or business-related IT projects.” from IDC report

IT teams are constantly looking to reduce complexity, and VxRail has proven to help customers meet their most challenging goals. Our customers are at the heart of what drives our VxRail roadmap, and we are committed to helping them address their biggest challenges in order to continuously innovate. The way we do this is by actively seeking and incorporating customer feedback through user group feedback, support requests and VMware engineering, shaping future features and platforms.

I want to thank all our customers who have provided the abundance of new proof points and customer stories showing the value our customers see with VxRail. Discover more customer stories, value assessments and analyst studies and learn how more than 19,000 VxRail customers experience exceptional results.

⁽¹⁾ Based on internal Dell analysis, August 2023.
⁽²⁾ Based on internal Intel analysis, August 2023.
⁽³⁾ IDC Business Value whitepaper, sponsored by Dell Technologies, VMware and Intel, The Business Value of Dell VxRail HCI document #US50586323, July 2023.