Dell EMC's hyperconverged portfolio offers flexibility and scalability

In a chat with VARINDIA, Rajesh Ramnani, Regional Director, VCE, discusses about Dell EMC’s PowerEdge servers and their enhanced applications – VxRail appliances and VxRack systems. He also talks about the benefits of the solutions, their go-to-market strategy and also how partners are adding value to these solutions 

PowerEdge servers by Dell EMC have been well accepted among customers. Worldwide, the customers rely on this server portfolio to address and optimize workloads at any level. This range of servers is meant to deliver performance, agility, cost saving and performance.   

“As the foundation for a complete, adaptive IT solution, PowerEdge servers deliver superior agility and reliability, outstanding operational efficiencies, and top performance at any scale. Dell PowerEdge 13th-generation server portfolio, the latest version of the PowerEdge server, is customer-inspired engineering built to optimize price performance for the widest range of web, enterprise and hyperscale applications, and features state-of-the-art advancements in storage, processing and memory technology coupled with industry-leading systems management capabilities,” remarks Rajesh Ramnani, Regional Director, VCE.

VxRail appliances and VxRack systems 
Based on hyperconverged infrastructure appliances and developed for VMware environments, VxRail appliances offer better CPU performance, flexibility in configuration, scalability and low in cost.   

“The VxRail Appliance Family, the industry’s only HCI appliances specifically developed and fully optimized for VMware environments, now has configurations powered by the latest Intel Broadwell Platforms, VMware vSphere and VMware VSAN technologies and is based on PowerEdge servers. These feature 40% more CPU performance for the same price, increased flexibility and scalability with more configurations than before, all-flash nodes equipped with 2x more storage and a new 3-node entry point that is 25% less expensive,” explains Ramnani.  

Dell EMC will add new updates of VxRail Appliances with VMware Horizon so that it can serve its customers better who look upon fastening time-to-value of an enterprise-class client virtualization solution. This solution also presents flexibility, performance and takes lesser time to deliver results.  

“For customers seeking to accelerate time-to-value of an enterprise-class client virtualization solution, Dell EMC will offer new configurations of VxRail Appliances with VMware Horizon. The solutions are specifically optimized for client virtualization in order to provide simplified deployment and management of virtual workspaces. The solution, validated by Dell EMC with support from VMware and NVIDIA, offers flexibility and high performance to accommodate a variety of needs and decreases time-to-delivery of the solution from weeks to days,” says Ramnani.  

Talking about another important solution, Ramnani says, “VxRack System 1000, the only rack-scale hyperconverged system with integrated top-of-rack Spine-Leaf networking and SDN options, is the perfect choice for core data centers that require both enterprise-grade resiliency and the ability to start small and scale easily. Now based on PowerEdge R630 and R730xd servers, these VxRack Systems offer more capacity and 40% more CPU performance without increasing footprint or cost. With more than 20 new configurations, customers have the flexibility to add as needed compute-heavy, storage-heavy or balanced configurations (in both all-flash and hybrid models) as needed to match their workload requirements".

Strategy
Holistic approach is what Dell EMC believes in. The company does not believe in solving only infrastructural difficulties but provides a comprehensive integrated solution.  

“Dell’s strategy and vision is to look holistically at the customers, not just solve their infrastructure challenges. Other vendors are concentrating on solving only part of the problem and are rigid, delicate, and proprietary. At Dell EMC, we have adopted a holistic approach to integrating hardware, management, solutions and applications. We have a rich heritage of providing organizations of all sizes the essential building blocks – industry-standard servers, storage, networking, and solutions. Dell has top benchmark results on TPC-H, SPEC rating scores over its nearest competition. We are open and integrated – not rigid. Customers can use what they have and remain flexible to adapt to technology and business changes. Data center solutions are powered by computing infrastructure that is intelligent, by network services infrastructure that is virtual, and by data management architecture that is fluid. Dell solutions trounce the competition in a comparison like this,” states Ramnani.  

Value addition by Partners
The solutions give ample opportunity to partners to add more value to the solutions and serve better to end-users. The ISV partners are certifying their applications on Dell EMC stack. They can add services which can help their customers to migrate easily from physical/virtual environment to virtual stack and can also help with new infrastructure.  

“Partners can add tremendous value over and above these products. Some of the options currently being followed by some customers are given below:
A)    ISV Partners are today certifying their applications on top of Dell EMC stack and provide end-to-end support for the entire stack.
B)    They can add services by helping customers migrate from their physical/virtual environment to virtual stack on top of Dell EMC hyperconverged infrastructure.
C)    These partners can also provide infra refresh, by helping customers refresh their old infrastructure to brand-new HCI platform,” concludes Ramnani.