New Dell EMC Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Advancements and Cloud-Like Consumption Model Ease Adoption

LAS VEGAS, May 8, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- DELL EMC WORLD 2017 --

News Summary:

• New Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) portfolio updates include Dell EMC VxRail Appliances 4.5, which offers expanded enterprise software and hardware options for the industry's fastest growing HCI appliances ¹
• New Dell Financial Services Cloud Flex for HCI offers cloud-like consumption model for on-premises HCI with simple monthly payments and no upfront costs or obligation after the first year ²
• New Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions reduce barriers to desktop and application virtualization on HCI with substantial simplification, predictable pricing and exceptional total cost of ownership

Full Story:

Dell EMC announces it is eliminating barriers to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) adoption with several updates to its HCI portfolio, including Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, VxRack Systems and XC Series, and new flexible consumption models aimed at making IT even simpler to acquire, deploy and manage.

"HCI is the fastest-growing part of the IT infrastructure market because customers want radical infrastructure simplification, and Dell EMC is the fastest-growing vendor in this segment with the strongest HCI portfolio, bar none," said Chad Sakac, president, Converged Platforms and Solutions Division, Dell EMC. "We're making the move to HCI even easier for customers with innovative payment solutions that eliminate the burden of upfront costs and long-term commitments, backed by HCI's ability to easily scale up and down."

According to IDC, the worldwide hyper-converged system market continued its trajectory as the fastest growing subset of the broader converged infrastructure market in 2016, surpassing US $2.2 billion in global revenue, a substantial increase of 110 percent compared to 2015. Dell Technologies was the fastest growing hyper-converged system market vendor, growing revenue 206 percent in 4Q 2016 year over year, based on the success of Dell EMC VxRail Appliances, VxRack Systems and the XC Series.¹

Customers to Gain More from Enhanced Dell EMC Hyper-converged Infrastructure Portfolio

The Dell EMC VxRail Appliance family is the industry's only HCI appliances powered by VMware vSAN™ and jointly engineered with VMware. According to analyst firm IDC, sequential revenue growth from VxRail Appliances was four times higher than the entire HCI market during the fourth quarter of 2016, demonstrating more than 70 percent quarter over quarter growth.¹ In response to VxRail Appliances being deployed increasingly for core data center applications, Dell EMC VxRail Appliances 4.5 delivers several new enterprise features available on Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation servers in the coming months:

• Enhanced enterprise deployment features – Streamlined installation and implementation experience designed to help enterprise customers manage VxRail Appliances at scale. The VxRail Appliance deployment experience, which is optimized to deploy a single appliance in only 20 minutes³, now can be applied to larger cluster sizes, allowing customers to add and manage 10 or more appliances as easily as a single appliance.
• Additional hardware flexibility lowers total cost of ownership – New single processor options, priced as low as US $25,000 for a three-node cluster,⁴ reduce the cost of deploying processor-based licensed software for scaling up to 64 nodes. New network options, including up to 12 additional ports, allow VxRail Appliances to be deployed in environments requiring physical network segmentation of workloads.
• Support for the latest VMware technologies – New VMware vSphere 6.5 and VMware vSAN 6.6 support adds optimized data service algorithms to accelerate flash performance, software-defined data-at-rest encryption to protect against unwanted access to data, and enhanced protection for stretched clusters.
• Improved interoperability with Dell EMC technologies – Customers deploying VxRail Appliances now can leverage a centralized Dell EMC Secure Remote Services (ESRS) gateway to provide a single point of secure, two-way remote support for their entire Dell EMC infrastructure.

The Dell EMC VxRack Systems, the only rack-scale hyper-converged systems with integrated top-of-rack Spine-Leaf networking and SDN options, are the perfect choice for customers embracing software-defined technology across the data center and ready for HCI with pre-integrated physical and software-defined networking. Updates to the VxRack portfolio of VxRack FLEX powered by ScaleIO and VxRack SDDC powered by VMware Cloud Foundation include:

• Support for more data-demanding applications –VxRack FLEX expands configurations with support for Dell EMC PowerEdge R930, enabling the most data-demanding applications such as OLTP, in-memory databases, OLAP, CRM and ERP.
• High performance networking architecture for modern data centers – VxRack FLEX now incorporates the next-generation Cisco Nexus 93180YC-EX switches that increase scale, improve performance and natively support software-defined networking.
• Enhanced hardware flexibility – VxRack SDDC now offers six additional PowerEdge R630-based server nodes for both expanded high performance and entry level options in cores, memory and CPUs.

The Dell EMC XC Series hyper-converged appliances combine compute, storage and virtualization resources in turnkey, 1U and 2U appliances configured to-order. XC Series appliances are best suited for customers requiring hypervisor choice, which may include Microsoft Hyper-V, and support a variety of specific use cases, ranging from typical enterprise business applications to VDI environments. Updates to the portfolio include:

• Dell EMC XC430 Xpress – This new appliance offers small to midsized companies a complete, all-in-one infrastructure solution with robust three-node configurations starting as low as US $25,000.⁵ Optimized for the smallest environments up to four nodes, the XC430 Xpress consolidates servers and storage in as small as 3U of rack space to drastically simplify on-site infrastructure.
• Dell EMC XC Series with Dell EMC Data Protection –Dell EMC Avamar Virtual Edition, Data Domain and Data Domain Virtual Edition with XC Series offer efficient, enterprise-level data protection and simplified backup and disaster recovery, offering capabilities not previously available with the XC Series.
• Dell EMC XC Series with Pivotal Cloud Foundry® – To rapidly develop and deploy applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry, XC Series and Pivotal® engineering teams have collaborated to create the ideal configuration and deployment guide, which reduces risk and accelerates a customer's ability to increase developer productivity and reduce IT operation costs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th Generation Servers to Offer HCI Portfolio Boost

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge 14^th generation server portfolio will serve as the modern compute foundation across the Dell EMC HCI portfolio. Through testing and validation, Dell EMC's fully engineered, turnkey HCI solutions will benefit from the advanced scale and performance of the new server portfolio to accelerate customers' journeys to modernize their data centers. Dell EMC will begin incorporating PowerEdge 14^th generation server capabilities into its HCI portfolio in the coming months.

New Innovative Payment Solutions for Cloud-Like Consumption Offer Hyper-Converged Infrastructure with Minimal Financial Risk

While organizations are increasingly adopting HCI solutions to simplify their IT infrastructure, barriers include upfront costs and perceived risk of a new IT operating model. Removing these barriers, the new Cloud Flex for HCI by Dell Financial Services (DFS) brings a cloud-like consumption model to the Dell EMC HCI portfolio by offering a flexible, financing solution that eliminates upfront capital costs with declining payments over time. This is offered, through Dell EMC and channel partners, with no obligation after the first year and allows customers to return any or all HCI appliances.

Cloud Flex for HCI is available immediately with Dell EMC VxRail Appliances and Dell EMC XC Series and has planned availability in the third quarter of 2017 for Dell EMC VxRack Systems.

Additionally, Dell EMC is dramatically reducing the barriers to entry for desktop and application virtualization with Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions powered by VMware Horizon. These end-to-end solutions encompass the infrastructure, software and the option of endpoints and services all from a single vendor. VDI Complete is based on VxRail Appliances or Ready Nodes for vSAN, and provides straightforward, predictable pricing and exceptional total cost of ownership with a single number for support. Customers can choose to either build their own VDI solution or buy a pre-configured end-to-end solution from as little as US $8 per seat, per month¹.

Availability:

• Dell EMC VxRail Appliances 4.5 has planned global availability in September 2017, with several features available to existing VxRail Appliances 4.0 customers in June 2017.
• Dell EMC VxRack FLEX updates have planned global availability in July 2017.
• Dell EMC VxRack SDDC updates are available globally now.
• Dell EMC XC430 Xpress has planned global availability in June 2017.
• The first phase of Dell EMC XC Series Dell Data Protection support is now available globally as a reference architecture.
• Dell EMC XC Series with Pivotal Cloud Foundry is available globally now as a reference architecture.
• DFS Cloud Flex for HCI and Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions are available now in select countries globally.

Customer Quotes:

Amiras Savani, manager of infrastructure, Jenner & Block

"We chose Dell EMC VxRail Appliances for our law firm's virtual desktops infrastructure platform and for hosting core functions including our email and database applications in our UK data center. The appliances have greatly reduced time needed for IT management, and Dell EMC support has been excellent, helping us get the solution up and running in only two hours. Our IT team endeavors to stay at the forefront of trusted, new technologies that enable us to be more efficient, and we've found that with Dell EMC VxRail."

Jason Bray, senior vice president of engineering, cardlytics

"The Dell EMC XC Series is helping to increase our speed-to-market, which is a big thing for us. Our bank partners love a solution that allows them to get up and running fast, and ahead of the competition. We love its scalability. Instead of adding a whole stack of servers to set up a new bank partner in the system, we can actually add one or two servers and horizontally scale solutions faster and more economically."

Analyst Quote:

Stu Miniman, senior analyst, Wikibon

"Simplification is one of the primary drivers for rapid IT adoption of converged infrastructure solutions. Hyper-converged infrastructure is a multi-billion dollar market segment that is seeing rapid growth, and Dell EMC is well positioned as a leader with multiple leading offerings. The pairing of cloud-like consumption models, like Dell EMC's Cloud Flex for HCI, with flexible pools of on-premises infrastructure, makes it even easier for companies to make the move to this model with reduced risk and less upfront cost required." 

Additional Resources:

• Video: Say Hello to Dell EMC VxRail Appliances
• Video: neXgen Group Success with Dell EMC VxRack Systems
• Video: Dell EMC XC Series Architecture Overview
• Video: Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions
• Blog: Dell EMC World Perspectives & Announcements: Time to Put an End the TCO versus TCA Debate Once and For All
• Blog: The Year that Dell EMC Changes Hyper-Converged
• White Paper: Hyper-converged Infrastructure as a Stepping Stone to True Hybrid Cloud
• Blog: Introducing Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions
• Connect with Dell EMC viaTwitter, Facebook,YouTube,LinkedIn andDECN
• For the latest news from Dell EMC, follow @DellEMCNews on Twitter

Dell EMC

Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies.  This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions.  Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 98 percent of the Fortune 500 – with the industry's most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.

Dell Financial Services

Dell Financial Services^TM (DFS) is the captive finance company for Dell Technologies, providing payment solutions to distributors, channel partners and end-users in more than 50 countries globally, financing over $6 billion annually. DFS can finance any technology - whether within the Dell Technologies family or a third-party solution – with a comprehensive global IT financing portfolio to help customers choose how they want to consume their technology.

Dell EMC World

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Copyright © 2017 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell, EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Other trademarks may be trademarks of their respective owners. 

¹ Based on IDC Worldwide Converged Systems Tracker, Q4 2016, March 23, 2017.

² Payment solutions provided and serviced by Dell Financial Services L.L.C. or its affiliate or designee ("DFS") for qualified customers. Offers may not be available or may vary in certain countries. Where available, offers may be changed without notice and are subject to product availability, credit approval, execution of documentation provided by and acceptable to DFS, and may be subject to minimum transaction size. Offers not available for personal, family or household use. Restrictions and additional requirements may apply to transactions with governmental or public entities.

³ Based on ESG Lab Validation report commissioned by EMC, "EMC Converged Platforms: VxRail Appliance," June 2016. 

⁴ $25,000 USD street price includes Dell EMC VxRail Appliance hardware, software and Dell EMC Enhanced Support.

⁵ $25,000 USD street price includes Dell EMC XC Series hardware, software and Dell EMC ProSupport.

SOURCE Dell EMC

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