Dell Updates And Expands Its XC Portfolio

Today at the Nutanix .NEXT event, Dell Inc. announced that it would be introducing new Dell XC Web-Scale Converged Appliances and features. Dell and Nutanix have been working closely together to accelerate their joint product development program and adding new hyper-converged applications to their portfolio. This is the first major update since February this year.

Today at the Nutanix .NEXT event, Dell Inc. announced that it would be introducing new Dell XC Web-Scale Converged Appliances and features. Dell and Nutanix have been working closely together to accelerate their joint product development program and adding new hyper-converged applications to their portfolio. This is the first major update since February this year.

Dell first introduced its Dell XC Series a year ago. Powered by Nutanix, the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances offer customers a new series of appliances combining compute, storage and networking into a single offering. The series has been shipping for six months now and Dell and Nutanix have been listening to customer feedback as well as watching the trends in hyper-converged adoption. From what the two companies have learned they are expanding and updating the series for new workloads.

The XC Series already supports both ESX-i and Hyper-V environments, now they will support native Nutanix Linux KVM hypervisor, and the new, open platform for virtualization and application mobility announced earlier, Nutanix Acropolis. XC customers can deploy appliance clusters in multi-hypervisors environments, which they can easily manage with Nutanix Prism. Along with this, there is the introduction of Nutanix Linux KVM Lite-compute node. This node enables customers to cost-effectively expand capacity of a XC Series cluster without the cost of adding compute and like-hypervisor resources. Nutanix Linux KVM Lite-compute node can run in an XC cluster with ESX-i, Hyper-V or Nutanix KVM.

Along with the new hypervisor, Dell will be releasing two new appliances as well, the Dell XC730-16G and the XC430-4. The XC730-16G is the first XC series appliance designed to work with NVIDIA GPUs. The XC730-16G can support one or two GRID K1 or K2 GPUs giving virtual desktops improved graphics performance while running image-intensive applications. The XC430-4 is a short depth, 1U appliance ideal for remote branches, tactical military, or other deployments of short depth racks.

Availability

The new appliances and features are expected to be available in the third quarter of 2015.

Dell’s blog post

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