Dell EMC Announcements Target HCI and Hybrid Cloud Platform

Written by Lynn Haber
August 28, 2017

Dell EMC also had some data protection and storage news announcements.

**Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services.**

VMWARE VMWORLD — A lot of Day 1 news from Dell EMC in the areas of hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) and hybrid cloud platforms, as sister company VMware kicks off VMWorld this week in Las Vegas.

In a nutshell, the vendor announced advances in VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC Systems; Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud turnkey platforms; and, new VMware Ready Systems. Dell EMC also had data protection and storage news. In particular, the vendor announced Transformational Data Protection for VMware, flexible consumption models, and XtremIO X2.

Dell VxRail Appliances, powered by VMware vSAN and jointly engineered with VMware, will sport the latest version of VxRail – version 4.5, this September. This new release improves life-cycle management for the latest VMware technologies, i.e. vSphere 6.5, vCenter 6.5, and vSan 6.6. The new VxRail version simplifies scalability, enhances security and offers management at scale or life-cycle management software upgrades to an entire VxRail cluster at once, according Bob Wambach, vice president of marketing with Dell EMC converged platforms and solutions.

Dell EMC’s Bob Wambach

According to IDC research, HCI was the fastest growing converged systems segment in the first quarter of 2017, accounting for one-quarter of the overall converged systems market revenue. It grew 65 percent year over year. IDC predicts the quickly growing HCI solutions market will surpass $7.6 billion by 2021. Dell EMC introduced VxRail in 2016.

Bob Wambach, vice president of marketing with Dell EMC, calls next-generation VxRack SDDC a data center in a box at scale. VxRack SDDC, codesigned with VMware, is a VMware environment at scale that includes networking, the cabinet, the physical connections and logical assembly. It’s a fast way to stand up a rack scale software-defined data center environment, he said. Enhancements include the latest VMware Cloud Foundation for automation and life-cycle management of VMware vSphere 6.5, vSAN 6.6, and NSX 6.3 in a single stack.

Another benefit: Forty new Dell EMC PowerEdge-based configurations include expanded CPU and all-flash storage options — including higher capacity 3.84 TB drives.

Moving on to enterprise hybrid cloud, the vendor now offers a turnkey hybrid cloud solution.

“This means it’s designed to run virtually any application workload as IT as a service (ITaaS) for most traditional applications and any type of new application either on premise[s] or in any number of public cloud environments,” Wambach explained.

Dell EMC’s turnkey hybrid cloud platforms – Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) and Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC) – offer a simple path to a hybrid cloud operating model with full life-cycle management and one contact support to reduce customers’ operational risk while speeding cloud adoption. EHC is now available globally on VxRack SDDC, offering customers a turnkey hybrid cloud experience on proven HCI with VMware’s software-defined data center stack. NHC built on VxRack SDDC also is available today via an early access program, the vendor said.

Dell EMC EHC extends its capabilities through updates to both …