LAS VEGAS – A year after EMC engulfed VCE into its federation the vendor has released a new series of hyper-converged RackScale systems called the VxRack.
VCE inside EMC has enabled the Hopkinton, Mass.-based vendor to switch gears to now offer a portfolio based on blocks, racks and appliances for data centres down to the SMB market.
The VxRack can take an environment with about a dozen servers and scale it to many thousands of servers able to handle tens of petabytes per day. The VxRack has the ability to run VMware EVO:Rail and the EMC ScaleIO software-defined storage system with built-in networking. This is a key feature according to Praveen Akkiraju, the CEO of VCE.
“VxRack is built on hyper converged Haswell technology blocks. This enables us to offer multiple flavours for compute and storage. It also solves the de-cupling of storage and compute, while also including networking on the Vx that’s connected, scalable architecture to add multiple racks and scale up. Today, you can’t scale up without networking. This leads to flexible networking and architecture building blocks,” Akkirajusaid.
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VxRack are architected to connect into the recently announced VCE Vscale Architecture supported by VCE Vision for multiple location and geographical environments. Akkiraju added that VxRacks complement VBlocks and VxBlock platforms for heavy workload apps such as ERP.
In addition, EMC’s VSPEX Blue hyper-converged appliance is also part of the vendor’s converged infrastructure portfolio for cloud and big data.
For the channel, EMC/VCE has engineered and configured these solutions for customer environments straight from the factory through reference architectures. David Goulden, CEO of EMC II called these reference architectures “well-defined recipe books.”
Akkiraju said that a hyper-converged strategy can provide a ready, out-of-the box solution that can be stackable in a cluster of 10 even for an SMB environment with 100 virtual machines.
“We’ve created an app store with this and I’ve fired up about it. With VSPEX Blue it has offerings for backup as an example. This is still early days but it can be a premier enterprise appliance and we plan to redefine the go-to-market strategy,” Akkiraju said.
Akkiraju said that VxRack can increase apps deployed by five times, while providing a four times faster time to market for new services.
Orders for VxRack with VMware vSphere start in July and should ship in the third quarter. VxRack with EVO:Rail and Virtual SAN will follow. Akkiraju said that VxRack systems will have software that can change the personality of the system. Future VxRack will be fully optimized for VMware and more will be coming that will have different personalities potentially ranging into the thousands.