By Charles King, Pund-IT, Inc. September 2, 2015
VCE announced that it has expanded its innovative hyper-converged rackscale systems family, VCE VxRack, with a new personality based on VMware’s EVO SDDC. According to the company, the new solution will enable IT organizations to quickly, cost effectively build and operate cloud environments to realize the benefits of a VMware software-defined data center (SDDC).
The VxRack VMware EVO SDDC solution is a turnkey scalable hyper-converged system. VCE will factory integrate VMware’s automated software-defined data center software with its VxRack hardware, VCE Vision software and VCE’s customer support. The new solution is designed to provide a flexible scale-out platform that removes complexity and enables efficient, faster realization of SDDC benefits.
This new VxRack persona reinforces VCE’s leadership in converged infrastructure. Its comprehensive set of solutions – Vblocks, VxBlocks, VxRacks and VSPEX Blue – help organizations accelerate and simplify their journey to the cloud. VxRack Systems can take advantage of the VCE VSCALE architecture and VCE VISION software to provide consistent data center scale resource pooling with consistent converged operations and management.
VCE’s new VxRack is suitable for organizations that want cloud agility and efficiencies with improved economics and security. It is also ideal for those who intend to standardize on VMware cloud technologies and want a solid foundation for their SDDC, or for organizations wanting to simplify and automate operations for VMware-centric data centers. The new VCE VxRack System based on VMware EVO SDDC will be orderable Q4 2015.
The pitch
VCE’s new VxRack solutions beneficially disrupt the VMware-based SDDC market.
Final analysis
For well-over a half decade, traditional IT markets have been fundamentally altered by a variety of economic, technological and behavioral forces, including;
- global economic uncertainty and continuing malaise resulting from the 2007-2008 recession and related events
- growing popularity of commercial public cloud alternatives to conventional business computing and IT infrastructure solutions
- emergence of purpose-built appliances specific applications and workloads
- the rise of converged and hyper-converged systems whose vendors perform most or all traditional design, engineering, testing and validation processes in the factory
Good enough but what do these issues have to do with VCE’s new VxRack solutions or the new VMware EVO SDDC offerings they mean to support?
The last bullet point obviously resonates broadly with VCE. But the fact is that the company’s larger solution portfolio, along with its core development and delivery strategies are designed to address the other critical issues roiling broader markets and to gain the full advantage of those disruptions for both itself and its enterprise customers. That includes leveraging its VxRack hyperconverged platform to support VMware’s new EVO SDDC.
According to VMware, enterprise and service provider customers will be able to use VMware EVO SDDC to deploy software-defined data centers at scale while meeting crucial initiatives. Those include supporting automated application and infrastructure delivery and business mobility, and achieving high availability and resiliency while also supporting security, control and choice.
A critical related point is that for EVO SDDC to deliver its true promise requires a hyperconverged hardware platform capable of supporting similar business critical scalability. That’s where VCE’s new VxRack persona comes in but how does the company achieve that? By taking a very different approach to system development than other vendors.
In essence, converged and hyperconverged solutions aren’t simply options for VCE; they are what the company does. Since its beginning, VCE has striven to take the idea of “best in breed” typically applied to specific hardware and software components, and extend it throughout the solution ecosystem with system-related technologies, including its Vscale Architecture and Vision management software, and processes, ranging from those on its own factory floor to what occurs in customer data centers.
As a result, solutions like VxRack can be engineered to optimally support the most complex requirements and demanding enterprise environments, including VMware’s new EVO SDDC. But just as it does with its other solutions, the company will also leverage what it calls the VCE Experience for the new VxRack EVO SDDC systems.
VCE solutions typically deliver remarkably better time to value than other solutions, a critical point for IT departments constantly struggling to “do more with less.” But that value continues over the life of the VCE/customer engagement via support experts who understand solutions from the inside out and ancillary services, including the pre-validation of system and software updates. Over time, the VCE Experience can eliminate days and weeks of costly, complex in-house efforts where errors can result in system malfunctions and security exposures.
In short, VCE’s new VxRack hyperconverged system should provide a powerfully scalable, robust, secure platform for VMware’s new EVO SDDC solutions. But more importantly, the ability of VCE’s platform to leverage complementary company technologies and services should allow VxRack for VMware EVO SDDC to provide customers an Experience that will be difficult or even impossible to find with other vendors.
© 2015 Pund-IT, Inc. All rights reserved.