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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 …

… Dell EMC and VMware software.

“Whereas Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is for general purpose applications, including most traditional applications, Enterprise Native Hybrid Cloud — think of it as simpler, more focused solution that is optimized for cloud native application development as well as the environment life-cycle management and support of that developer environment. It’s the simplest and best way to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry,” said Wambach.

Lastly, complementing Dell EMC’s turnkey hybrid cloud platforms, the company announced VMware Ready Systems from Dell EMC for customers wanting to deploy hybrid clouds on HCI. Ready Systems provide a simple, standard approach to building hybrid clouds while enabling customers to take on more of the deployment, configuration and life-cycle management responsibilities.

The new VMware Ready Systems from Dell EMC will be pre-tested and highly repeatable cloud offerings that combine VMware cloud software with Dell EMC HCI options of VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC Systems for a Dell Technologies-aligned stack. They’re designed for deployments of any size, and offer quick and low-risk deployments with a lower capital investment than with the turnkey life cycle and single support model of EHC and NHC.

Similarly, for customers who want to build and manage the life cycle of their own HCI stacks, Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are now available featuring the 14th generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes deliver the economic benefits of HCI for organizations that prefer to take on more operational aspects otherwise addressed with turnkey HCI solutions. The entire Dell EMC hyperconverged portfolio will transition to 14^th generation PowerEdge servers by the end of 2017.

Ruya Atac-Barrett, senior director of marketing, Dell EMC, expanded on the data protection and storage news. Noting that data protection needs to transform to address the challenges of the software-defined data centers of tomorrow, Atac-Barrett announced Transformational Data Protection for Virtualized Mission Critical Applications.

“With the shift to SDDC and more deployments in the cloud, data protection needs to transform. In that world [SDDC], data protection needs to be zero-touch and near instant where it’s a part and parcel of the production environment and part and parcel of rolling out your applications — and not a separate standalone, after the fact afterthought,” she said.

Transformational Data Protection for Virtualized Mission Critical Applications is for large, fast changing databases, with self-service, and addresses today’s two data-protection challenges: technology and operational. The new solution will first be available for Microsoft SQL, in September, and will be available for Oracle databases in the fourth quarter, Dell EMC said.

Atac-Barret also announced new flexible consumption models for the new Dell EMC data protection. The vendor is offering a one-to-three-year subscription model, and a data protection storage solution Data Domain on a pay-per-use model.