Dell EMC Advances HCI Appliance Transition

Now that next-generation Intel processors are being made available in hyperconverged infrastructure appliances (HCI), many IT organizations will have to start coming to terms with depending less on rack-based systems.

Dell EMC today announced that it is making available HCI appliances based on the Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers that incorporate the latest CPUs in the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable series. Those systems will be incorporated into both the Dell EMC VxRail series of HCI appliances for VMware environments as well as the Dell EMC XC Series of HCI appliances the company makes available to run HCI software from Nutanix on top of one of three different hypervisors. Dell EMC rates these latest HCI appliances as providing 1.7x more processing power and up to 62 percent increased internal bandwidth.

Bob Wambach, vice president of marketing for the Dell EMC Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, says the latest generation of HCI appliances can now scale out to handle the demand of most new and existing workloads. In fact, HCI appliances are the fastest growing segment of data center infrastructure, note Wambach.

“Right now, this is the hottest segment in IT,” says Wambach.

Demand for HCI appliances should only increase further as NVMe interfaces make it possible to scale applications even higher using solid-state drives (SSDs) and other forms of non-volatile memory.

Wambach says rack-based systems are not going to disappear overnight. There are far too many legacy applications running that require access to external storage. But almost every new application is being written to assume that an HCI architecture is in place that unifies compute and storage, says Wambach. In fact, Wambach says, it’s only a matter of time before many legacy applications will be refactored for HCI appliances.

Cloud service providers have been making use of HCI architectures for years, so in many ways local data center environments are simply catching up with a more efficient way to deploy and manage IT infrastructure. Of course, not every IT organization is going to make that transition at the same pace. But for all intents and purposes, data centers in the future will increasingly be made up of HCI appliances rather than traditional racks.