Evolving Enterprise Tech: What Does 2016 Hold?
Moving beyond the high end of the data center, VCE, a unit of EMC, today unveiled a family of appliances specifically optimized for VMware environments.
Priced starting at under $60,000, each VxRail appliance can be configured with up to 112 Intel Xeon-class processors which, when integrated with storage, create a hyperconverged appliance that IT organizations can scale out as needed.
As a complement to existing VCE rack and block platforms designed to support thousands of virtual machine, Gil Shneorson, vice president and general manager for VxRail, says IT organizations can configure VxRail appliances with any mix of Flash or magnetic storage they see fit. Maximum capacity per appliance is 76TB of all-Flash storage.
Shneorson says IT organizations are looking to flexibly deploy hyperconverged systems made of blocks, racks and appliances in a way that allows them to be uniformly managed. For example, the requirements of a branch office are often better suited to an appliance than they are racks of hyperconverged systems typically found in a data center. All told, VxRail appliances can be configured to support as many as 3,200 VMware virtual machines.
In addition, Shneorson notes that tight integration with VMware software such as VMware Virtual SAN reduces the total cost of computing because everything from data deduplication and erasure coding to virtual machine replication is built into the VxRail platform. That level of integration, says Shneorson, can only be achieved when engineering teams that work for the same EMC parent company collaborate.
The degree to which VCE will be able to upend a host of rivals that have created various types of appliances naturally remains to be seen. But given the dominance of VMware in the data center, it makes sense for VCE to expand its IT infrastructure footprint starting with what it knows best.
