Today at VMworld Europe, Dell Technologies announced several enhancements to its Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure system. These new enhancements center around automation, analytics, and workload support. The company is also announcing two all-NVMe based platforms.
Today at VMworld Europe, Dell Technologies announced several enhancements to its Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure system. These new enhancements center around automation, analytics, and workload support. The company is also announcing two all-NVMe based platforms.
First announced in 2016 under the EMC banner, the VxRail was an appliance that was built with VMware, for VMware, and to enhance VMware environments. The appliance family worked as a way for companies to start off small into their virtualization journey and easily scale as needed. VxRail gives users an easier path for vSAN along with single vendor support. Back at the US VMworld, Dell Technologies added Kubernetes support as well as options for hybrid cloud infrastructure. Today the company is enhancing the product even further.
On the hardware side of things, Dell is releasing two new appliances that leverage the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and all NVMe storage. These new appliances include:
- The VxRail P580N all-NVMe four-socket (4S) platform is ideal for SAP HANA workloads, delivering 2x the CPU and memory per system over the prior generation.
- The new VxRail E560N all-NVMe 1U platform, designed for high performance workloads at a competitive price point, ensures customers can choose the best platform to meet their workload and budget requirements.
Another hardware change is the offering of NVIDIA T4 GPUs in 1U E series platforms. AI and deep learning are becoming omnipresent in information technology, and the addition of these GPUs gives a cost-effective option for edge deployments. NVIDIA’s Virtual Compute Server (vComputeServer) software is also available with VxRail; benefits are said to include increased utilization, added security, and ease of management in virtualized environments.
VxRail and VxRail clusters are popular with customers and are expanding in data centers requiring more networking needs. Seeing automation as a solutions Dell Technologies as partnered with its internal Dell EMC Open Networking partners to expand HCI network fabric automation with the introduction of Dell EMC SmartFabric Services (SFS) for multi-rack VxRail clusters. According to the company, admins will see a radical shift to simplicity adding that they need only to enter one command per switch and Dell EMC SFS will automate over 99% of the configuration steps for multi-rack leaf and spine fabrics.
On the analytics front Dell Technologies is releasing its VxRail Analytical Consulting Engine (ACE). ACE should lead to further automation for VxRail cluster management with global views of all users’ clusters, health scores, drill down analytics, anomaly alerts, predictive capacity analysis and upgrade orchestration.
Availability
Dell EMC VxRail ACE is expected to be available this month. Dell EMC VxRail P580N, E560N platforms and Dell EMC SmartFabric Services are expected to be available in December.
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