Announced today, the new VxRail appliance family from VCE was jointly engineered by EMC and VMware to provide affordable, turnkey hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIAs) for data centers and other enterprise settings.
The new VxRail systems are designed for easy scalability in small and midsize data centers, as well as for enterprise departmental use, and “edge” environments. EMC and VMware say the VxRail systems are the only integrated and jointly engineered HCIA systems for VMware environments.
With support for either hybrid or all-flash storage, the cost of the new appliances starts at $ 60,000. VCE said that the all-flash option provides twice as much flash storage as other hyper-converged appliance offerings. The price makes them ideally suited for users who want to start small and scale up, according to VCE.
That helps cover what were “critical gaps for customers, especially those operating remote or branch offices or other operations at the enterprise edge,” said Chad Sakac, president of EMC’s converged platforms division, in a blog post. “With VxRail we have it, and we think we have nailed it.”
‘Nothing Comparable’ for VMware Integration
The release of the new appliance family completes VCE’s and EMC’s converged and hyper-converged portfolio by bringing together the features previously offered by VxRack and Vblock, Gil Shneorson, VP and general manager for VxRail at EMC, told us in an exclusive interview.
Vblock systems allow users to reduce complexity and the total cost of operations through a combination of discrete components from different technology partners, Shneorson explained. VxRack offers a hyper-converged solution for very large users. And for its part, VxRail delivers the benefits of both and can be deployed by much smaller companies or in branch locations.
“It also has serviceability features not available unless you’ve developed from scratch,” Shneorson said. “There is nothing that is comparable if you value that level of integration with VMware.”
Ready for Action
Available today and shipping starting in March, the VCE VxRail appliance family has been in development for more than a year and a half, Schneorson said. The technologies have been in beta testing for a month or two, with numerous users covering a range of enterprise sizes and sectors, he added.
One of those customers, the Renault Sport Formula One Team, said that the new VxRail appliances will deliver significant time and cost savings for them. Antony Smith, the team’s IS infrastructure manager, estimates that when used trackside at events, the savings in freight charges alone will be approximately $ 200,000 per season. They foresee the simplified set-up of the VxRail will help their team get “up and running much quicker at every race, offering a significantly improved user experience.”
Fast Growth for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Seventy percent of IT users recently surveyed on hybrid-cloud trends have said they plan to invest in hyper-converged infrastructure over the next two years, according to research from the Enterprise Strategy Group. That reflects a growing overall market for integrated infrastructure and platforms like VxRail.
VCE is well positioned to serve the market, according to research firm IDC. The company was named by IDC as the top vendor worldwide for integrated infrastructure as of Q2 2015, with a 26.3 percent global market share.
Image Credit: All logos and VCE VxRail Appliance (pictured above) via VCE.
