Johannesburg, 24 Feb 2016
Technology budgets are under pressure. Yet companies cannot afford to abstain from new IT investments. Leading businesses in 2016 are digital businesses, placing cloud, mobile and big data at the centre of their strategy.
Companies large and small in all industries are working hard to transform themselves and need new modern technology to support this transformation. Converged and hyperconverged infrastructure as well as the private cloud are the foundations of the technology needed for this 'quantum leap'.
Yet those same technologies demand infrastructure that isn't efficient to establish and maintain, said Tom O'Reilly, CTO at VCE EMEA:
"No one has time to find all the different components that go into a data centre, procured from separate vendors, put together and ensuring they all work together and then manage the lifecycle by keeping them up to date and secure."
The very notion of a data centre (DC) is already too big for many companies to digest, particularly in the SME world. At the same time enterprises that do embrace DC technology often find it filled with challenges.
To the rescue comes converged infrastructure.
The Power of Convergence
"Converged infrastructure has really taken off in the last few years," said O'Reilly of the $2 billion-in-quarterly-sales industry (IDC). "As a way to more simply procure, implement and manage IT infrastructure over its lifetime, it has been a game changer."
But VCE, the converged infrastructure division of EMC and pioneer of the concept, hasn't rested on its laurels. Its VxRail Appliance serves enterprises, but also enables smaller companies to deploy their own DC technology.
Many companies don't realise the value of DC infrastructure, either internally (private cloud) or hosted at a remote facility (public cloud). But this approach is the bedrock of 21st century business computing. Data centres enable virtualisation, which allows for many more servers to operate on a single machine. These host various services from e-mail and customer management to data backups and collaboration tools to data analytics and virtual desktops.
It has been called the third platform: a world of more flexible and cost-effective services that can be scaled according to a company's needs. An astute observer will note how smaller companies have been accessing enterprise-grade software at vastly reduced prices. This is a direct impact of DC culture, which converged infrastructure simplifies on many levels.
Yet converged infrastructure has remained the domain of the big players - until now. With the launch of the VCE VxRail Appliance, DC capabilities are made available to both smaller businesses and large organisations seeking to enhance the edge of their networks.
"The idea with VxRail is to offer a solution at the long tail of the data centre market," explained Chris Norton, VCE Country Manager for South Africa. "Many companies want to give such features to remote branches or even specific departments, but found such niche deployments prohibitively complicated and costly. Potential new customers were also interested, but the cost of a large converged infrastructure solution sat beyond their capital investment expectations. VxRail solves this - it is a quantum leap in the market."
Data Centre in a Box
If put in a plebeian way, one could call VxRail a data centre in a box. It was co-designed with VMWare, encompassing the hardware, network, storage, virtual and software layers needed for a one-stop solution. A single unit is able to provision 200 virtual machines in a matter of minutes, while scaling the infrastructure with additional VxRail boxes is easy. It was all designed for a minimum of fuss: if a VxRail unit starts to falter, replacing it is a quick and painless operation. The system is ready-made with its own management software and it will plug into any existing VMWare management ecosystem, as well as mix with current VCE products. Even its software has a ready-to-go charm: the VCE marketplace offers free and paid applications deployable at a click's notice.
"The important thing to understand is how this brings a new capability to the market," said Norton. "Enterprises can use VxRail to equip parts of the business with data centre capabilities without adding extra load to central infrastructure."
For example, if an enterprise has a remote branch that needs to crunch a lot of analytical data, it can deploy a VxRail server on-site, thus avoiding the pain of re-engineering its core infrastructure. It also sidesteps the problems and costs of pervasive connectivity: whereas a branch would normally connect to private or public cloud servers, VxRail offers on-site autonomy.
The benefit for the SME market, he added, is access to enterprise data services at a much better price: "Smaller companies are often very interested in how data centre technologies can help them grow, but the upfront investment is a barrier. Through VxRail they can start that journey on their terms and build their infrastructure unit by unit as they grow."
The whole point of VxRail is to offer simple, affordable and managed data centre capacity either on-site or in a public datacentre. This is good news for companies facing the paradox of strained budgets versus the need to exploit technology.
"With this VCE is very cleverly bringing all the knowledge and understanding of the enterprise space and making it relevant to the SME market. So we're changing the game in term of how converged infrastructure is built, shipped and delivered."
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