Since its inception five and a half years ago, VCE has done only one thing and done it better than any other company – simplify the deployment of converged infrastructure. The company's flagship product, Vblock, brings together VMware, Cisco, and EMC infrastructure in a preconfigured, validated design, allowing customers to stand up a private cloud in under a week. Deploying a private cloud at that speed is impossible if all of the infrastructure has to be tied together manually.
Vblock and recently released VxBlock products are really targeted at large enterprises and tier 1 service providers for supporting mission-critical workloads. What's missing from the VCE portfolio is a platform to support applications like next-generation databases, cloud-native, and tier-2 applications that require rapid deployment and significant scale-out capabilities.
This week at EMC World in Las Vegas, VCE announced the release of a new product, VxRack, aimed at meeting the needs of that market. VxRacks are rackscale, hyper-converged systems that enable service providers and enterprises to manage the initial deployment and subsequent scale out of cloud-native, mobile, and other applications.
While many hyper-converged appliances are aimed at small enterprises and remote offices, VxRack gives customers the scale and "VCE Experience" desired by the core data center. This is a pre-configured, pre-engineered, fully integrated, multi-vendor solution with a single support number to call. Customers know their VCE-converged solutions will work, and now they can have the same comfort with hyper-converged systems.
VxRack Systems leverage EMC's ScaleIO software-defined storage solution and includes integrated top-of-rack networking to ensure seamless scaling and connectivity into the data center. Also, VxRacks offer a choice of hypervisor that includes VMware, KVM, or even bare metal. The network products in the system are Cisco top-of-rack Nexus switches.
Later this year, VCE will offer customers a VxRack System optimized for VMware environments that offer a fully integrated VMware stack based on EVO:RACK technology, including the vRealize suite.
Lastly, VxRack Systems have been designed to integrate into the recently announced VCE Vscale data center architecture and will be supported by VCE Vision software to enable a fully unified data center that spans multiple locations. Because of this, current VCE customers can easily incorporate VxRack Systems into their existing environments through the use of shared "pools" of compute resources.
VCE's experience in delivering agile, robust, and resilient infrastructure has been its calling card for the past five years. Now VCE takes those attributes and brings them to a highly scalable, factory-integrated, and VCE-supported Hyper-Converged engineered system. The addition of VxRack should enable a broader range of customers with a variety of use cases to take advantage of the VCE experience.