VCE Launches VxRacks at EMC World 2015
EMC division VCE took the spotlight at EMC World 2015's opening keynote when it introduced a family of hyper-converged rackscale systems designed to simplify the deployment of next-generation scale-out mobile, cloud, and distributed tier 2 applications.
Targeting the decentralization trend affecting many enterprise IT departments courtesy of cloud, the consumerization of IT, and mobility, VCE's VxRack Systems address the inefficiencies – both compute and cost – these "islands of hyper-converged offerings" generate, wrote Trey Layton, chief technology officer at VCE in a company blog.
"Central IT, when they are unable to provide economical, scalable, easily provisioned resources to their departments, find they have decreasing influence with their lines of business. The result is cluttered, disparate collections of resources that can’t, and aren’t, shared across the company. It’s an inefficient use of budget dollars, as well as an inefficient use of the pools of resources that underpin the entire data center infrastructure," he said.
The software-defined VCE VxRack Systems can scale from dozens of servers to many thousands of servers with tens of petabytes of storage, according to VCE. The systems use VCE's pre-engineered factory-build infrastructure with single call lifecycle support and use EMC ScaleIO software-defined storage and built-in network to support their scalability. The VxRack Systems can uncouple the compute and storage capabilities, enabling enterprises to most effectively leverage the hyper-converged architecture. The hyper-converged rack-scale system fits with VCE's Vblock portfolio within the VCE Vscale architecture. IT also can choose the software stacks most appropriate to their environments from options such as:
- A VxRack System with a hypervisor such as VMware vSphere, KVM, or bare metal. This system includes EMC ScaleIO software-defined storage; Cisco top-of-rack Nexus switching, and optional factory integration of VMware vRealize management and orchestration suite. This version can be ordered in July and will begin shipping next quarter, the vendor said.
- A VxRack System designed for VMware environments, including integrated VMware stack based on VMware's EVO:Rack and VMware Virtual SAN. This model will be available in the third quarter.
Most enterprise customers and service providers do not need the additional power and storage VxRack Systems provide, said Nina Hargus, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at VCE in a company blog. But those running web-scale applications next to mission critical applications in their datacenters require hyper-converged rackscale systems that easily scale to meet fast-growing demand, she said.
"Rather than being an exception to the rule, operating at cloud speed is now the “new normal.” As fast as business is changing, IT leaders are challenged to respond even faster. Not surprisingly in this environment, IT organizations simply cannot afford to delve down into the build-out and operation of their data center infrastructure at the individual component levels of compute, network and storage," Hargus wrote. "For enterprises and service providers, the operational complexity of their applications and services has increased exponentially in the cloud and big data era," she said. "We are seeing platform 3 (web-scale applications) being introduced alongside today’s mission critical applications. VCE’s vision of expansion with a full portfolio of converged infrastructure system choices, and vertically with greater factory integration of M&O technology and applications, is intended to bring simplicity and agility to our customers."
These solutions connect to VCE Vscale Architecture and will be supported by VCE VIsion software, according to the developer.
