Selecting a Cloud Service: 5 Questions to Ask Prospective Providers
Aiming to make it simpler for IT organizations to manage the entire data center via a single pane of glass, Dell EMC and VMware have collaborated to more tightly integrate a VMware Cloud Foundation suite of software with VxRack systems from Dell EMC that are now based on PowerEdge servers.
Gil Shneorson, vice president and general manager for VxRail within the converged platforms and solutions division of Dell EMC, says Dell EMC VxRack System with SDDC will better unify the management of software-defined data centers on top of a converged infrastructure platform using management software developed by VMware.
The VMware Cloud Foundation on top of VxRack knits the core VMware vSphere platform with VMware VSAN virtual storage and VMware NSX network virtualization software into a single offering that can be managed via VMware vCenter software that can now reach all the way down to PowerEdge servers.
“VMware vCenter will provide the single pane of glass,” says Shneorson.
The Dell EMC VxRack itself is a rack-based system optimized for VMware that is designed to be a complement to VxRail appliances that Dell EMC offers. Sheneorson says Dell EMC expects many customers will opt to deploy both racks and appliances in the same data center depending on the nature of the application workload. The Dell EMC VxRack system combines PowerEdge servers, storage originally developed by EMC, and switches from Cisco in a pre-integrated system. The VxRail appliances are a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offering that unifies the management of PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC storage. Dell EMC is reporting over 7,000 VxRail appliances have been deployed.
Since the early days of the acquisition of EMC by Dell to form Dell Technologies, there has been a commitment to enable the former EMC portion of the combined company to work more closely with sister company VMware, which operates as an independent unit of Dell Technologies. The combined weight of the units of Dell Technologies is now starting to make its collective presence felt across the data center.
