Subscribe
  • Home
  • /
  • Software
  • /
  • SD South Africa a step closer with arrival of VCE hyper-converged appliances

SD South Africa a step closer with arrival of VCE hyper-converged appliances


Johannesburg, 25 Apr 2016
Available in multiple configurations, VxRail allows you to start small with as little as 20 virtual machines and scale to thousands.
Available in multiple configurations, VxRail allows you to start small with as little as 20 virtual machines and scale to thousands.

With software-defined everything (SDE) and enhanced application performance among the top-of-mind issues for South African CIOs, the release of VCE's range of VxRail appliances is set to fast-track South Africa's moves to simplified, more efficient environments.

Unveiled in Q1 this year, the VxRail is described as the only fully integrated, preconfigured, and pre-tested VMware hyper-converged infrastructure appliance family on the market. VxRacks will work with the VCE Vscale Architecture and VCE Vision software so they can be included along with Vblocks in unified data centres that span multiple locations.

VCE VxRail Appliances enable organisations to eliminate complexity and collapse cost structures while leveraging existing VMware investments. Based on VMware's vSphere and Virtual SAN, and EMC software, VxRail delivers an all-in-one IT infrastructure transformation by leveraging a known and proven building block for the Software Defined Data Centre (SDDC). It provides IT organisations with a full range of options to create a flexible, optimised infrastructure that dramatically simplifies their IT operations while reducing costs.

For South African mid-sized to large enterprises, this means a quick entry into the world of hyper-convergence, says VCE. "As a way to more simply procure, implement and manage IT infrastructure over its lifetime, converged infrastructure has been a game changer," says Tom O'Reilly, CTO at VCE EMEA. It is a sector already making $2bn in sales a quarter.

An increasingly hot topic globally, hyper-convergence represents the evolution of the converged infrastructure, where compute, server, storage, networking resources and software are pooled together on commodity hardware, allowing for greater abstraction of hardware and software, more centralized management and enhanced virtualisation capabilities. This new market is growing fast, with Technology Business Research's (TBR) 1Q16 Hyper-converged Platforms Market Landscape report estimating a 50% compound annual growth rate for the global hyper-converged platforms market from 2015 to 2020, reaching $1.6 billion in revenue.

The good news for small- to mid-sized local enterprises is that this quantum infrastructure leap is not limited to major enterprises. With the launch of the modular VCE VxRail Appliance, organisations can start small and scale out; as well as incorporating branch and remote offices simply and cost-effectively. The VxRail Appliance family delivers a known and proven building block for the software-defined data centre that delivers up to 5x the performance of other hyper-converged appliances. All-Flash configurations deliver a transformative 8X boost in performance. Scale capacity and performance easily and non-disruptively up to 64 nodes (16 appliances) per cluster, allowing organisations to start small and grow incrementally without up-front planning. Importantly, VxRail differs from other hyper-converged systems in terms of ease of management, which makes things faster, more agile and more efficient, with positive implications for the all-important application delivery sphere.

Chad Sakac, President of the Converged Platforms Division at EMC, noted in a recent blog post: "There are the classic "four P's" that a team needs to consider, and VxRail nails them." Sakac lists them as:

1. Pricing - starting at $60 000 list price. This is particularly important in a market which is all about "starting small, and scaling up".

2. Product - modern hyper-converged offers need all flash. They need dedupe. They need compression. They need real erasure coding. They need flexible configurations. They need rich local and remote replication. They need cloud object storage integration and local NAS support. They need to make "day 2" operations single-click simple.

3. Positioning - anyone who says that one converged or hyper-converged offer can cover every use case is (IMO) as high as a kite, or suffering from "single product delusion". Reality? Some customers can get away with one product for all workloads and scales (for them). Most need more. Most need:

a. Vblock to cover the enterprise datacentre with the most traditional workloads.

b. VxRack to cover the enterprise datacentre when a customer wants to scale BIG, and "don't worry about the network" is tantamount to planning for failure.

c. VxRail, which is built to start small, and scale.

d. VxRail, which is ideal for SMB, SME - heck with 64 nodes in 16 appliances - it can run 3000+ VMs and could run many enterprises.

e. VxRail, which is unbelievable at the enterprise edge - where extending their standards from the datacentre, integrated management, simple workload mobility - is powerful.

4. Packaging - people who understand technology and innovation as ultimately powering business understand this is important.

a. Only VxRail has been developed by VMware and EMC operating with a single product team - for this release, for the Q2 update, for what we have in Q3, and for everything afterwards.

b. Only VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance with a single support model for everything inclusive of the VMware software. VSAN-ready nodes can of course have a single support stack for VSAN and the hardware it runs on, but a hyper-converged appliance is more than hardware + an SDS stack.

c. Only VxRail has integration with VxRack and Vblock to deliver a full enterprise solution for all workloads, all leveraging VCE Vision, and the ability to replicate and protect from the enterprise edge to the datacentre, and for all workloads. And what we're delivering in Q1 only will get stronger.

Share

Editorial contacts

Tracy Burrows
VCE