EMC Corporation has announced that customer adoption of the VCE VxRail Appliance is exceeding expectations.
VxRail Appliances are the only hyper-converged infrastructure appliances that are jointly engineered with VMware and are fully integrated, preconfigured, and pre-tested for VMware environments.
Deployment can start small and scale with single node upgrades; it also reduces data center footprint and CapEx. It also offers Flash Speed at Hybrid prices and free EMC RecoverPoint for VMs. The VxRail Appliances supports small/midsize data centers and for enterprise departmental and edge environments.
Among the companies using VCE VxRail Appliance are AmerisourceBergen, Convergys, Dimension Data, proALPHA Business Solutions GmbH, and Zetes Industries.
“As our business grows, so has IT’s responsibility,” said Ty Mallard, Vice President, IT Services, AmerisourceBergen. “When we deployed latency-sensitive applications to our remote offices, it was critical that the infrastructure behind it make scaling and management simple. By standardizing on VxRail Appliances, our infrastructure and environments were able to expand beyond the capabilities of conventional, centralized infrastructure yet require minimal support from IT."
Convergys chose the VxRail Appliance because it led every requirement that it tested against and provided the company with a 20 percent performance gain over our existing approach.
“ It lead the highest density of a single VM running on a node, it led the highest density for a node with multiple VMs as well as obviously led the highest density of a complete node versus the competition,” according to Jim Harris, Director of IT Infrastructure, Convergys.
At Dimension Data, the appliances reduce complexity with network, compute and storage by being packaged together which in turn delivers more operational efficiency as the company is managing one view versus multiple.
“Now our set-up and shut-down process at the start and end of a race can be reduced by 20-minutes at each which can save us up to an hour of time,” said Tim Wade, Sports Practice Senior Director, Architecture Group, Dimension Data.
What impressed proALPHA Business Solutions GmbH the most is the VxRail Appliance’s consolidation of all the management functions into a single console and the pre-configured choice it offered the company.
“Since our environment for key applications is virtualized with VMware, the VxRail Appliances easily allowed us to enhance our dynamic infrastructure to achieve additional efficiency gains we need to grow our business,” according to Markus Gehm, IT-Service, proALPHA Business Solutions GmbH.
Meanwhile, Zetes Industries needed to consolidate its infrastructure and reduce time spent deploying virtual machines, thus it chose the VxRail Appliance.
“What was once an arduous procedure, is now streamlined and we are able to create and deploy new VMs in under six minutes each,” Sergio Soares, IT Manager, Zetes Industries. “That, combined with EMCs total support of the hardware and its software, allows us to focus on the needs of our business, not the needs of our infrastructure.”
All-Flash VxRail Appliances Generally Available
The mass adoption of flash is driven by the desire to run an increasing number of virtual workloads on fewer physical machines combined with the new economics of Flash storage. All-flash VxRail Appliances extend the industry’s broadest all-flash portfolio to hyper-converged use cases.
EMC is now shipping a full range of all-flash VxRail Appliances that enable customers to modernize their data center and remote office deployments with as little as 3.8TB of flash to more than 76TB – over 2X more flash than any other hyper-converged appliance. Additionally customers can combine appliances to meet growing demands – a 64-node all-flash cluster that delivers 1,792 cores and 1,216 TB of raw storage, making it the industry’s most powerful HCIA to date, maximizing performance and scale for applications that demand low latency.
Through the use of the latest 3-D or vertical NAND (3-D NAND) technologies and VMWare Virtual SAN 6.2, VxRail Appliances deliver much higher flash capacity than any other competitive offering at a lower price. VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 features an advanced performance optimization architecture that now adds data efficiency capabilities – deduplication, compression and erasure coding – for all-flash storage that delivers highly cost-efficient performance while optimizing the use of flash drives. As a result, VxRail Appliances all-flash configurations have reached the crossover point between flash and magnetic storage pricing and are offered at the same price per raw gigabyte as hybrid appliances.